I like to have a step zero, that comes even before you try to reproduce the issue: get your head right, essentially. If something's broken in production and th

I like to have a step zero, that comes even before you try to reproduce the issue: get your head right, essentially. If something's broken in production and the bug is hard to figure out, that often means stress. And stress is not good for helping you to solve problems. So take a few breaths, slow down, relax. Slowing down to get into the right frame of mind helps get to the _right_ fix faster, because your panicked brain is not jumping to all kinds of speculative conclusions about what the solution might be. Be calm, observe, reflect. Coincidentally, I wrote a blog post about this and my other steps for debugging not long ago: https://philbooth.me/blog/how-to-debug https://philbooth.me/blog/how-to-debug