Almost like rubber ducking with yourself (honestly, that’s not a dirty phrase) while keeping a record of it. One voice in my head asks a question, and the other voice in my head answers it. When should I make a pledge? Should I listen to the voices in my head? So what does this have to do with debugging? I’ve just finished fixing a couple of “Where do I even start?” bugs, and figured I’d pass on what I do when tracking down issues. Design notes, debugging notes, and technology research get dumped into VoodooPad for later reference if needed. I usually keep one document for each client, thereby isolating any sensitive information, and if the terms of the contract involve handing over engineering notebooks, I can give them the file, and delete it from my machine.
Voodoopad reviews pro#
I’ve been using Flying Meat’s VoodooPad Pro as my design and debugging notebook for years and years.
But for debugging, I like having more than just a simple plain text log. Since then I’ve also kept logs of day to day work life, which have come in handy during annual review time. The most interesting things are the first question “Good Lord, where to start?”, and the colored annotations (hot pink for interesting data, orange for crude hyperlinks to other pages.) I had a really nice set of colored pens. Here I’m tracking down some speed issues that happened on certain classes of HP machines. This is from March of 1997, working on performance problems in AOLserver, a high throughput threaded webserver that powered most of AOL’s web content at the time. Back in the day, I used to use those hardbound notebooks you find in office supply stores: It’s also really nice to have when you go talk to a colleague and they ask “ok, what have you tried so far?” But in light of fresh evidence, it becomes the key that unlocks the problem and points to a fix. You might have jotted down something yesterday or the day before, which at the time didn’t mean much. With the log you’re building a record, a stream of evidence about the bug. These are the kinds of bugs I start keeping a log of what I do.
Voodoopad reviews full#
My first professional bug took a full month to track down. The fact is, you know it might be an hour or two. Maybe it’s one you know is going to be tough to track down because of threading.
Voodoopad reviews how to#
Uh… I’m not sure how to even start approaching this problem.” These are the bugs where you know you’re in for a long haul. The other class of bug is of the form “whoa. These are my favorite kind of bugs because they’re over and done with quickly, I can get a quick hit of that “you done did good” glow from making a software system better, and then move on to some more interesting problem.
The steps are pretty easy: Figure out how to reproduce it. The first is of the form “I think I know where this is” which won’t take long to find. I usually encounter two classes of bugs on a regular basis.
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