You might think of the Linux kernel as something that only kernel developers need to know about. Not so! It turns out that understanding some basics about kernels and systems programming makes you a better developer, and you can use this knowledge when debugging your normal everyday Python programs. We’ll talk about how to use strace, ltrace, /proc, and friends to debug your servers and your misbehaving programs. A few specific tricks we’ll cover: * how to recover files with /proc (and other tricks) * using strace to understand programs without reading their source code * easily hunting down which log file a program is writing to and what commands it’s executing You’ll come away with a new toolset for debugging your programs that works in any programming language. This talk will be focused on Linux tools, with some references to their OS X counterparts.