Debugging
104 bites tagged Debugging — interview questions with model answers, and 60-second explainers.
Observability: Seeing Inside Your System
Observability is the ability to ask new questions about your system's health without shipping new code. It's crucial for debugging distributed systems and is the first step in triaging an outage.
Perfetto: See Your Whole System on One Timeline
Perfetto is a flight recorder for your system, capturing kernel and app events on a single timeline. Use it to diagnose complex issues like jank by correlating app behavior with system activity.
StrictMode: Your Main Thread's Watchdog
StrictMode is a developer tool that acts like a strict supervisor for your app's main thread, catching slow operations like disk or network access. It helps you find performance issues before they cause "Application Not Responding" errors.
Layout Inspector: Debug Your UI Hierarchy
Layout Inspector is an X-ray for your app's UI, rendering a live 3D model of your component tree. Use it to debug visual glitches or find performance bottlenecks from deep layouts. The footgun is forgetting it has live updates to catch bugs during animations.
Android Studio Profiler: Find Your App's Bottlenecks
The Android Studio Profiler is your app's diagnostic dashboard, showing real-time CPU, memory, and network usage. Use it to hunt down UI jank, find memory leaks, and optimize battery-draining network calls.
Android Debug Bridge (ADB): A Developer's Remote Control
Android Debug Bridge (ADB) is a developer's universal remote for an Android device. This command-line tool lets you install apps, view logs, and run shell commands, bypassing the UI. It's used for debugging, file transfers, and automation.
Logcat: The `tail -f` for Android Apps
Think of Logcat as `tail -f` for your Android app, streaming system and application messages from a device in real-time. It's your primary tool for debugging crashes, tracking execution flow, and inspecting variable values as your app runs.
Log Analysis: Reading Your System's Story
Log analysis turns raw, machine-generated records into a coherent story about your system's health, security, and performance. It's crucial for debugging production failures or investigating security incidents.
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