Whether you’re a beginner coder or a seasoned developer, a gnarly bug can interrupt the fun and flow of the work. But as programmers, we’re professional problem-solvers — and debugging is the core tool of our trade! In this talk I’ll share some of my favorite strategies and tools for figuring out what’s going wrong in projects of all sizes. We’ll cover how to isolate and reproduce bugs, how to read and reason through code you didn’t write, and how to use both human mental techniques and helpful tools (including effective use of AI assistants) to solve issues in PHP and JavaScript… And we’ll talk candidly about how to approach and prioritize problems on those projects where everything goes wrong all at once.
Whether you’re working on your first plugin or maintaining a complex client project or enterprise site, these problem solving skills will help you work more confidently and spend less time stuck. This talk is aimed at beginner to intermediate developers who want to understand and fix bugs faster so they can get back to the “fun stuff!”