“The Pocket Guide to Debugging” zine and Debugging Puzzels by b0rk (Julia Evans)
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/10
I forgot scheduling this post, but it is still very relevant: about the debugging related materials by b0rk (Julia Evans) as they are not limited to just “The Pocket Guide to Debugging”.
It is excellent material to learn at home, work or be used during education.
Before the Elmo* takeover, she mainly used Twitter to post beta material and later the final versions. Easiest queries to find back the Tweets are:
- [Wayback/Archive] from:@b0rk debugging zine – Twitter Search
- [Wayback/Archive] from:@b0rk debugging stragegy – Twitter Search / Twitter
Here are some of links found via the above lists of tweets:
- [Wayback/Archive] 🔎Julia Evans🔍 on Twitter: “I’ve been working on this zine almost every weekday for the last 6 months with @omarieclaire and it would be nowhere near as good as it is without all of her advice.”
- [Wayback/Archive] 🔎Julia Evans🔍 on Twitter: “It’s here!! My new zine “The Pocket Guide to Debugging” is out now!! It has 47 pages of my favourite strategies for solving your sneakiest bugs. 🔎🐛 Get it here for $12:
wizardzines.com/zines/debugging-guide“ - [Wayback/Archive] 🔎Julia Evans🔍 on Twitter: “I’m going to release the debugging zine later today!! Here’s a sneak peek at the final table of contents: And if you want the TOC as a poster, here you go:
wizardzines.com/images/debugging/toc-letter.pdf“ - [Wayback/Archive] jvns.ca/debugging-zine.pdf: a “small” (20 page!) teaser about debugging on Linux and MacOS. It starts with a short list of how Julia got better at debugging, then covers these major areas:
- I/O and system calls (dstat, strace, opensnap, eBPF)
- Networking (netcat, netstat, ngrep, tcpdump, wireshark)
- CPU (perf)
It then ends with a small epilogue which includes contact information.
- [Wayback/Archive] A debugging manifesto with a cool set that everyone should internalise and bring into practice:
Hello! I’ve been working on a zine about debugging for the last 6 months with my friend [Wayback/Archive] Marie, and one of the problems we ran into was figuring out how to explain the right attitude to take when debugging.We ended up writing a short debugging manifesto to start the zine with, and I’m pretty happy with how it came out. Here it is as an image, and as text (with some extra explanations)- Inspect, don’t squash
- Being stuck is temporary
- Trust nobody and nothing
- It’s probably your code
- Don’t go it alone
- There’s always a reason
- Build your toolkit
- It can be an adventure
- [Wayback/Archive] The Pocket Guide to Debugging is the real thing. At only USD 12 (e-book) or USD 16 (e-book plus print) it is a steal. full For teams you can get it starting at USD 170 (smaller teams) up to USD 600 (really big teams). Of course this excludes taxes and shipping.
Since I started learning to program 20 years ago, I’ve learned a more fun (and more effective!) way to debug
[Wayback/Archive] wizardzines.com/images/debugging/toc-letter.pdf Table of Contents PDF (easier to print or search in than the above image)
- [Wayback/Archive] Print directions don’t forget them, as they make it way easier to print any of b0rk’s zines (:
- [Wayback/Archive] Notes on building debugging puzzles
Hello! This week I started building some choose-your-own-adventure-style puzzles about debugging networking problems. I’m pretty excited about it and I’m trying to organize my thoughts so here’s a blog post!
The two I’ve made so far are:
I’ll talk about how I came to this idea, design decisions I made, how it works, what I think is hard about making these puzzles, and some feedback I’ve gotten so far.
…
All of them can be found on [Wayback/Archive] https://mysteries.wizardzines.com/
- [Wayback/Archive] The Case of the Slow Websites
- [Wayback/Archive] The Case of the Connection Timeout
- [Wayback/Archive] The Case of the DNS Update That Didn’t Work
- [Wayback/Archive] The Case of the 50ms request
- [Wayback/Archive] The Case of the Failed Docker Connection
Repository: [Wayback/Archive] jvns/twine-stories: twine
Searches
–jeroen
* [Wayback/Archive] Twitter Insiders and Users Are Calling Elon Musk by the Nickname Elmo
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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