Installing Rookout on your Node.JS application is usually a breeze. Run `npm install`, add a line of code, and you are done. Yet, in some rare cases, we encounter more frustrating use cases. For example: When those tough situations arise, our customers often refer to this blog post we wrote years ago about deploying a Java Agent. So, if you are looking for an easy and portable way to deploy Node agents without changing your code, you’ll want to read this article.

In every job and every company, that day always comes where you find that you…actually need to do some work. And by that, I mean finding new innovative solutions to tasks and projects instead of going with the tried-and-true methods. Recently, my team, of full stack developers were tasked with building a webview app to support our live debugging IDE plugin. This would allow us to align the user experience with our pre-existing web app.

If you have been a long-time user of the Google Cloud Platform, you’re likely familiar with the StackDriver suite of Observability and Operations tools. The most unique part of that suite was Google’s StackDriver Debugger, which was designed to debug live code in cloud and production environments with a click of a button. Unfortunately, StackDriver has been renamed as Google’s Operations suite, and the Debugger has been deprecated.

We all know that debugging and troubleshooting cloud-native environments is no walk in the park. Sometimes we forget that debugging the frontend portion of those applications is no simpler and comes with its own set of challenges. We also all know how hard it is to get logging just right: managing verbosity, volume, and usefulness to just the right level.

There’s nothing worse than creating that perfect cup of coffee, sitting down, putting yourself into the mindset of digging deep into your production environment, and…nothing. Because your application is a complex living beast and seeing how all the pieces fit together is often more than you’ve bargained for. While trying to figure out what’s what, your coffee is growing cold, and you’re becoming increasingly frustrated.

We always want to use the best of the best when it comes to Kubernetes tooling. We keep up with the latest projects, download them when ready to try them out, and see where they could fit in our development work here at Rookout. As part of our migration to Kubernetes native tools, our most important goal is to make it seamless and smooth so our developers will stay agile, fast, and happy. For some of that migration, we’ve faced some challenges, particularly with pipelines.

Every developer has experienced the pain of debugging. We know that you know what we’re talking about. Who hasn’t been lost jumping between different windows troubleshooting their code, log-jammed trying to track bugs in a pile of logs, or been caught screaming at a rubber duck that’s blankly staring back at them? But it shouldn’t be that way.

It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting to learn code or if you’ve been doing it for a few years – sometimes you feel like you have no idea what you’re doing. This feeling can be made even worse by the wealth of information out there, making the right decision can get stressful. Life is full of those tough choices: Coke vs. Pepsi; Yankees vs. Red Sox; Python vs. Flask. You know, regular questions about soda, baseball, and Python frameworks that almost everyone faces.

What a time to be alive! The information age we are currently in has given us more data and choices about, well, everything. But let’s be honest, do any of us actually feel like we’re more informed than we were? Because all this information comes with more choices. Expanded choice is actually an “explosion of choice” – in other words, if the world were a restaurant, the menu is so long you spend more time choosing your order than actually eating it.

As you could probably guess, we discuss debugging a lot at Rookout. We tackle many methods and strategies throughout all our blogs and resources. However, it only recently occurred to us that we don’t have a direct face-off of the two major methods of modern debugs: live debugging vs. remote debugging. At first glance, this might sound like semantics, but the two terms have come to embody specific methods and protocols. Both are powerful, but there is some fine print to look at also.