This is the story of a Java debugging journey that started with a question I couldn’t answer about Java stack traces. As a long time Java programmer, I am approached for help by developers who encounter unusual problems in the language.

There's a line in the second Harry Potter film where a wizard named Mr. Weasley asks “Tell me, what exactly is the function of a rubber duck?” It’s a good question. Some acceptable answers: rubber ducks are for singing to in the bath, floating down a river as part of a creative fundraiser raise money, or to entertain your dog. Developers, however, have a completely different answer to Mr. Weasley's question.

You probably know that Honeycomb is the most flexible observability tool around. Its powerful high-cardinality search makes working with real raw data quick and easy. But as you may have learned through hard experience, fetching those dots can still be quite a challenge.

Whether you’re the consumer or producer of an API, you’ve no doubt seen that good error handling can make debugging easier. And you may have noticed that error handling works best when everyone speaks the same language and has the same expectations. But what makes for good error handling? And how can we implement it and ensure consistency across our application?

In an ideal world, bugs would never reach production. But, software errors are an inevitable part of a developer’s life. Java debugging tools exist to help us resolve errors faster, so we can get on with doing what we do best. This list of Java debugging tools will help you evaluate your options quickly so you can find the best for the job.

In A Comedy of Errors, we talk to engineers about the weirdest, worst, and most interesting application and infrastructure issues they’ve encountered (and resolved) over the years. This week, we hear from Or Weis, co-founder and CEO of Rookout. Rookout’s focus is on collecting data in a seamless, immediate way that maximizes a developer’s insight into live code.