kokopelle | Debugging Life

The following material, resorts for debugging life, is adopted from J.M. Gould’s article “Some psychological evidence on how people debug computer programs”.

I find these to be so very true. My older age has confirmed that the experimentation should only be a list resort… but such wisdoms comes with time and excessive past experimentation.

Resorts for Debugging Life:
#1 First resort: Think
#2 Impasse? Sleep on it!
#3 Impasse? Describe the problem to somebody
#4 Debugging tools (tools that help identify a problem) as a second resort
#5 Avoid experimentation – use only as a last resort

Fun fact: debug 1945, of machine systems, from de- + bug "glitch, defect in a machine." Meaning "to remove a concealed microphone" is from 1964.