While writing code, you stumble upon a problem and scratch your head investigating it for a few hours until you give up and put in a gnarly workaround. You just wasted a few hours and the only result you arrived at is a bit of unsatisfactory tech debt. Relatable? It is for me. Something didn’t work, and you want to understand if the problem is unique. Or did you just encountered the known bug? Perhaps, it’s a known limitation, and there exist known workarounds for it? In the end of the day: was it you, or was it the faulty software? 🙂

In my personal journey, I stumble upon code issues every day. In this presentation I’d like to share some research methods and tools I am typically using while encountering issues with code I am yet to understand. We’ll start by taking a look at simple yet still powerful methods of finding answers such as using typical (or not so typical…) search engines and scanning StackOverflow, to using various CLI tools to search source code, scan years of git logs, all the way to visiting darker, lesser known corners of the web like niche mailing lists, forums and old bug trackers and asking ChatGPT the right questions. “Doing the homework” is how I call this process of gathering information.

The presentation is designed to resonated with a broad audience of engineers, from linux sysadmins to software developers.