Jacob’s Tech Tavern

Jacob’s Tech Tavern

Softcore Debugging

A slightly sexy tour of Xcode’s debugging tools

Jacob Bartlett's avatar
Jacob Bartlett
Jan 21, 2025
∙ Paid

A work friend told me they had a visceral gut disgust reaction, any time an engineer described some piece of code as “sexy”.

Naturally, I became incredibly diligent about highlighting especially saucy Objective-C method swizzles, or particularly demure protocol extensions.

I am not a good fit for corporate environments.

Today’s Quick Hack is a whistle-stop tour of the myriad tools built into Xcode that help you debug your app in your day-to-day. You’re likely familiar with most, but I hope you’ll spot something novel in our tour of conditional breakpoints, faster LLDB commands, and memory graph traversal.

Paid members get lots of nice things:

⚓️ Access my full library of paywalled articles (including this one)
🚀 Read free articles a month before anyone else
🧵 Master concurrency with my full course and advanced training
🧑‍🚀 Get a free copy of my new eBook, “Land your iOS Tech Job”
❤️‍🩹 Support independent, sometimes funny, tech writing

User's avatar

Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Jacob Bartlett.

Or purchase a paid subscription.
© 2026 Jacob Bartlett · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for writing, podcasting, and media founders.