I have often found myself being able to dig forward way after many of my peers (not all) are out of ideas. I have seen a shift in my own ability to debug proble

I have often found myself being able to dig forward way after many of my peers (not all) are out of ideas. I have seen a shift in my own ability to debug problems after I realized that with increasing "hardness" of the bug, you need to just increase the level of systematicness and rigor of your method. The very first thing should probably be to carefully check which commit introduced the error, and then carefully study the code changes in that one for clcues. After that, and possibly based on that, what probably most people will do is start their debugging process by running a debugger through some suspicious parts of the code, based on varying degrees of well-informed suggestions. For problems that escape those first tries though, what you often need to do is to start a systematic process of ruling out possible sources for the bug. In many ways this resembles scientific studies where you try to control as many variables as possible, and also include control samples with known states, trying to zoom in on only the particular variable you are studying without noise from other things. That can mean feeding the system or code under study with carefully set up data for which you know what the effect should be, and then carefully trying to change each part of it and observing the outcomes. Things like that. In my experience, this type of effort will eventually most often lead to the solution. The main challenge I think though, is to realize how deeply you might need to go with the systematization and automation of things, to really rule out possible sources and start zooming in on the general area around where the bug is. You might need to take some real drastic measures, and this is where I see most people who fail, don't go far enough. Here you might need to really get away from the screen to get your thoughts flowing more freely ... but not in an undirected way, but rather trying to answer the question "How can I do this in an even more systematic way ... to rule out even more possible sources, or identify unexpected behavior". Not super easy to put into words, but this is in my experience the way to go. Finally, one caveat is that there are certain things you should probably check before even going the systematic path. Things that can totally screw things up so that whatever you do, you never get any systematic pattern of behavior or behavior change. These things often are related to caches in various form. Make sure to turn off any and all kinds of caches in the system. They will almost guaranteed drive you insane otherwise.