John K. Paul is the CTO of ThinkPragmatics, the organizer of the NYCHTML5 meetup group, and former lead technical architect of Condé Nast’s platform engineering team. He is a also contributor to a few open source projects including requireify, jquery-ajax-retry and one single commit into jQuery. He has spoken to various startups and enterprises around NYC about front end development, and scalable engineering practices.
As programmers, we are explorers just as much as we are builders. The process of building software requires spelunking in the caves of source code, looking for the periodical cicadas, or the common house fly. Through encounters with many kinds of bugs, we have crafted unique ways of finding them, and de-bugging them.
In the early days of JavaScript, we rocked debugging with alert(), but now, with the advent of modern JavaScript runtimes like V8, our debugging experiences rival the best of the industry. I’d like to take you a journey through the history of debuggers, starting from Microsoft’s JScript editor all the way to the current node-debugger. Even more recently, node just landed v8_inspector support directly into the runtime, so we can use the Chrome Debugging Protocol/Chrome dev tools to step debug anything in the node world.
Through this journey, we’ll learn how we got to the current state of the world and many esoteric side tracks through the history of debugging JavaScript.