Practical insights on platform engineering, developer experience, and building teams that ship. Each issue is written to be useful, actionable, and applicable. No filler, no promotions-only emails. Enter your email and sign up for free right now.
Weekly Reflection #30 - Think Before You Debug
|
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) InsightMy favorite debugging story comes from Rob Pike when he recounted a time he was pair programming with Ken Thompson at Bell Labs. Pike was at the keyboard. When something broke, he'd immediately dive into stack traces, print statements, and the debugger. Ken would simply stand behind him and think, ignoring the code they'd just written. Then, often before Pike had finished reading the trace, Ken would say, "I know what's wrong." And, he was usually right. Ken was holding a model of the code in his head. When something broke, the bug revealed itself in that model before it appeared in the code. He'd work out how the failure could even happen, and the gap that surfaced was usually a deeper flaw than whatever showed up on screen. I've never regretted taking the Ken Thompson approach. It feels slower to sit and think before you start poking. But those quiet minutes are how you fix the design instead of patching the symptom it threw off today. WisdomEveryone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
Brian Kernighan, The Elements of Programming Style
ReflectionWhat are you reacting to right now that deserves a step back first? Lagniappe
|
Weekly Reflections Newsletter
Practical insights on platform engineering, developer experience, and building teams that ship. Each issue is written to be useful, actionable, and applicable. No filler, no promotions-only emails. Enter your email and sign up for free right now.
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight I've been working with someone recently, migrating a manual, multi-step process out of Excel and into a Python workflow. It requires significant upfront work. You have to understand the task before you can automate it. But when you find the right solution, the whole thing runs without you. It's a thing of beauty. Effective automation drives the toil of a task toward zero. Wisdom...
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight At PlatformCon 2026, Kelsey Hightower gave a talk titled ZTA: Zero Token Architecture (a name he admits isn't really a thing, but it sort of is now, isn't it?). The whole idea comes down to: don't outsource your ability to think, just because these tools exist. One of his examples involves working with database tables. Someone teaches an AI agent to build one, then asks it to...
This week on Book Overflow, Pramod Sadalage came on to reflect on Software Architecture: The Hard Parts. He co-wrote it, along with Building Evolutionary Architectures, the book behind Weekly Reflection #19 - Design for Evolution. In our most recent interview, he described a SQL Server database with 287,000 tables. Nobody wanted to touch it, because any change might break something no one knew was connected. Pramod treats that fear as a measurement. It marks where the coupling is hidden. So...