I am a puts debuggerer
I am a puts debuggerer. I don’t say this to disparage people that use a Real Debugger. I think Real Debuggers are great, I’ve just never taken the time to learn one well. Every time I try to lean one, I end up not using it for a while and have to re-learn how to use it. Anyway, I want to share some tricks I use for puts debugging with you. I use these tricks whenever I don’t understand how something works and I want to know more. Most of the stuff below is definitely not a “best practice” and you should never leave this code around when you’re done with a debugging session. However, I think it’s important to say that when you’re debugging anything goes. I mean anything. Global variables, redefining methods, adding conditionals, manipulating the load path, monkey patching, printing the call stack, anything.
I’ve tried to stick to real world examples in this post. However, many of these examples came from when I was trying to debug security issues in Rails, so please reuse the techniques I’m showing here but not the target code. The target code I’m trying to debug is broken, and I don’t want you to use it.
