Christian Heilmann

New article: “Beyond console.log() – level up your debugging skills”

Tuesday, March 9th, 2021 at 12:41 pm

Today, Sitepoint released an article they commissioned me to write a few weeks ago that a lot of work went into and I’m happy with the result. In Beyond console.log – level up your debugging skills I describe a few features of Chromium browser developer tools and how they interact with Visual Studio Code.

syncing changes with workspaces

I cover the following topics/features:

  • Getting more information in your console.log() statements by wrapping values with curly braces
  • Formatting/converting log values with specifiers, for example console.log(‘%ix %s developer’, 10, ‘console’) resulting in “10x console developer”
  • Grouping logging statements
  • Using console.info(), console.warn() and console.error() to allow for filtering
  • Timing things with console.time() and counting with console.count()
  • Using live expressions to avoid slowing down your debugging with tons of log messages
  • Using Console utilities
    and built-in convenience methods like $() or monitor()
  • Using console.table() to display information, f.e. can you guess what console.table($$(‘img:not([src^=data])’), [‘src’,’alt’]) does?
  • Moving from Console to Sources
  • Using the Command Menu to access functionality faster
  • Storing your DOM manipulation scripts in Sources fo easier re-use
  • Enhancing third party websites with Overrides
  • Syncing changes you do in Developer tools live with your editor using Workspaces
  • Using the browser developer tools in Visual Studio code using the Edge Devtools for VS Code extension
  • Moving on to breakpoint debugging

VS Code Devtools extension

Go read the full article on Sitepoint

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Check out the Dev Digest Newsletter I write every week for WeAreDevelopers. Latest issues:

Don't stop thinking, AI Slop vs. OSS Security, rolling your own S3 Despite AI you still need to think, Bitter lessons from building AI products,  AI Slop vs. OSS security and pointer pointer…
200: Building for the web, what's left after rm -rf & 🌊🐴 vs AI What remains after you do a rm -rf? Why do LLMs know about a seahorse emoji? What image formats should you use? How private is your car?
Word is Doomed, Flawed LLM benchmarks, hard sorting and CSS mistakes Spot LLM benchmark flaws, learn why sorting is hard, how to run Doom in Word and how to say "no" like a manager.
30 years of JS, Browser AI, how attackers use GenAI, whistling code Learn how to use AI in your browser and not on the cloud, why AI makes different mistakes than humans and go and whistle up some code!
197: Dunning-Kruger steroids, state of cloud security, puppies>beer

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