Debugging sounds like a very straightforward task. You place breakpoints, run the program, and see where it stops and what values the fields hold at that point. When it’s not enough, you make yourself a big warm mug of coffee, sprinkle the code with println statements, and mentally prepare for a day of reading logs and re-running the program over and over until it starts to make sense.

But if you have the right tools at your disposal, debugging in Scala does not have to be such a grueling task. This talk explores practical techniques and underused features of IntelliJ IDEA’s debugger to help you pinpoint bugs with precision, even in complex codebases. We will cover, among others, conditional breakpoints, log expressions, the call stack, the println debugger, and unsuspended breakpoints for logging. You will leave this talk with actionable insights to improve your debugging experience and reduce reliance on verbose log statements.