Throwing away assumptions and trusting nothing, where it makes sense to do so. I've been burnt too many times by library bugs, framework issues and the other layers between me and what I'm actually doing. When I first started out I used to think that browsers such as Chrome were infallible and any problems
had to be with my code.
As a result of being burnt, I'm happy to give up on logging and trawling through code in favour of just taking a PCAP and finding out what's actually going on over the wire. Or stracing my app written in a high-level language which runs in a VM. Sometimes you just want to see the syscalls.
I'm also happy to go digging in the browser's source code. I think my favourite bug to diagnose manifested as a visual issue with menus in a frontend framework. The menus were styled with some CSS, nested inside a media query:
@media (hover: hover) {
These styles were only supposed to apply on desktop devices with a mouse pointer capable of hovering over HTML elements.
The rules seemed to apply on some OnePlus devices though, with just a touch screen as an input device.
Getting to the bottom of this involved creating a test page to reproduce the problem, reproducing it in multiple browsers, digging into Firefox for Android's source code (yay FOSS) to find out how it implemented the media query, writing an Android app to reproduce the underlying data problem and eventually working out that it was a problem in the phone's operating system.
As a result of being burnt, I'm happy to give up on logging and trawling through code in favour of just taking a PCAP and finding out what's actually going on over the wire. Or stracing my app written in a high-level language which runs in a VM. Sometimes you just want to see the syscalls.
I'm also happy to go digging in the browser's source code. I think my favourite bug to diagnose manifested as a visual issue with menus in a frontend framework. The menus were styled with some CSS, nested inside a media query:
These styles were only supposed to apply on desktop devices with a mouse pointer capable of hovering over HTML elements. The rules seemed to apply on some OnePlus devices though, with just a touch screen as an input device.Getting to the bottom of this involved creating a test page to reproduce the problem, reproducing it in multiple browsers, digging into Firefox for Android's source code (yay FOSS) to find out how it implemented the media query, writing an Android app to reproduce the underlying data problem and eventually working out that it was a problem in the phone's operating system.