Please Create Debuggable Systems

When a system isn’t working, it’s far easier to debug the problem when that system produces good error messages as well as useful diagnostics. Silent failures are sadly the norm, because they are just easier to implement. Systems based on conventions or automatic configuration exacerbate this problem, as they tend to just do nothing and produce no error message. Let’s see how to fix this. Rails popularized “convention over configuration”, but it often fails to help when conventions aren’t aligned, often silently failing with no help for debugging. This cultural norm has proliferated to many Ruby tools, like Shopify’s ruby-lsp, and pretty much all of Apple’s software design. I asked my editor to jump to a definition and the LSP didn’t do it and there is no error message. I took a picture on my phone, it’s connected to WiFi, as is my computer, and it’s not synced to my photos. There is no “sync” button, nor any sort of logging telling me if it tried to sync and failed or didn’t try and why not. I’m creating my dev and test databases and it doesn’t create my dev database, but creates my test database twice. (I hope this poor guy figured it out…it’s been seven years!) We all experience these failures where we get an error message that’s not helpful and then no real way to get more information about the problem.