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> I hate debugging. Anyone that’s worked at a desk near mine has likely witnessed my debugging cycle of rage, insight, disbelief, and existential despair. I lo
by peterhajas 13y ago
> I hate debugging. Anyone that’s worked at a desk near mine has likely witnessed my debugging cycle of rage, insight, disbelief, and existential despair.
I love debugging. Debugging is such a fun thing to do - inspect the problem, dissect the architecture, test your assumptions.
- dllthomas 13y agoWatching House can help.
- aninhumer 13y agoExcept that House's process is basically equivalent to making a vague guess of the problem and then quickly hacking it into production and waiting to see if anything else breaks.
- dllthomas 13y agoWatching House helps make debugging less frustrating/painful. I didn't say that following House's example makes debugging happen any better. Occasionally, taking a page from differential diagnosis is probably a good idea, but obviously do whatever makes sense to your situation when it comes to deployment practices.
- greenyoda 13y agoIt's much more than that. First of all, his "guesses" are based on extensive experience and a very deep knowledge of anatomy, pharmacology, etc. Second, whenever he comes up with a hypothesis, he always orders tests to confirm whether he was right (but sometimes, the only available test is to try something on the patient and see what happens). And he's a big fan of Occam's Razor (there's even an episode by that name in the first season, I think), always looking for the simplest hypothesis that will explain the largest number of symptoms. All of these things apply to debugging too.
- drharris 13y agoSame here. These days I work too much on project management and architecture, with occasional refactoring. I rarely get to spend weeks on end diagnosing a really niche bug anymore. New code and architecture is always fun (clean slate syndrome), but I really miss the debugging process. It's what makes programming worth it.