PHP is a great language to start with when you are learning how to code. It has a simple syntax, it’s easy to learn and you can make dynamic websites with it. But even though it’s easy to write PHP code, it’s not always easy to debug. There are a lot of tools out there that can help you, but since PHP is an interpreted language, you can also use a couple of debugging techniques to help you find bugs in your code. In this blog post I'll cover the the following sections.

As we see more customers adopting Rookout for debugging cloud-native applications, we are not surprised to learn that a significant number of them work in a microservice environment. In the most common case among these customers, each service has its own code repository maintained by the team who develops the service.

Debugging is the process of identifying and fixing any issues in the source code of a program. Modern IDEs like Eclipse provide debugging tools that make it easier for developers to walk through their code interactively and inspect it to spot and resolve any issues.

In modern software development and operations, everything can be monitored. This isn’t a matter of technology. If you want to monitor something, you can. However, modern monitoring tools come with a price, and while sometimes that price isn’t too high, at other times the cost can be unbearable. For example, an APM tool that monitors your server’s health with CPU and memory metrics is pretty cheap and non-intrusive.

Troubleshooting customer issues in production is a difficult job. These are the issues that impact the business the most, so consequently, stress levels are almost always at a high. And it’s never fun to be measured against an SLA, which feels like you’re stuck in a losing battle. And it’s especially hard in the world of microservices and Kubernetes, because it’s so difficult to recreate a reliable replica of production in your local development environment.

Over the last year, we have witnessed a shift in engineering working habits. COVID-19 forced many of us into lockdown. Instead of working from the office, coffee shops, and airport lounges, I found myself mostly working out of my (hastily built) home office. For many of us, this meant shifting back to a workstation over a trusty laptop. Not surprisingly, this did nothing to abate the heated discussion over which computers and operating systems are best for developing software.