A Ruby Gem Debugging Strategy

Is a gem you’re using not behaving the way you expect or giving a cryptic error you don’t understand? If you’re comfortable diving into the gems your app depends on, you’ll be able to track down and fix a whole new class of bugs that you might otherwise have to work around.There’s no wrong way to debug an issue so long as you eventually figure out the problem. I’m going to outline how I go about tackling these kinds of issues, but if you have or find a way that works better for you, go for it. My goal is to show you how to get started debugging issues that fall outside of your application’s codebase so that you can expand the kinds of issues you can solve, as well as give you a path to start contributing back to the open source community. Where you take it from there is up to you.