My App Crashed, So I Took a Nap and Called It “Async Debugging”
My app crashed the other night.
Logs were useless. Stack trace pointed nowhere.
So I did what any rational developer would do:
I closed my laptop, laid down on the floor, and declared it “async debugging.”
And honestly? It worked.
Not the code — that was still broken.
But I rebooted.
Which is more than I can say for the app.
Developer downtime is a feature, not a bug
We talk a lot about runtime errors and race conditions.
But no one talks about the existential ones.
Like when your toolchain takes two minutes to boot.
Your CI fails at random.
And every task board has 14 different “priorities.”
At some point, you’re not debugging anymore - you’re just enduring.
This is why devs snap
Not because the app broke.
But because everything around it did.
The process.
The tooling.
The Slack pings.
The dashboard that 404s on load.
We burn out in between commits -
while waiting for things to load, or sync, or deploy, or get approved.
So yeah. I took a nap.
Not out of laziness - out of system failure.
Async Debugging: A Methodology
- Observe the bug
- Panic briefly
- Walk away before you break more things
- Return with snacks and a slightly clearer mind
- Realize it was a missing semicolon the whole time
I’ve started building better systems since.
Not just in code - in how I work.
Tools that don’t punish you for pausing.
Workflows that don’t fall apart when you do.
Because sometimes the most productive thing you can do…
is absolutely nothing.