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.
Same 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.
Except 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.
Watching 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.
It'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.
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I love debugging. Debugging is such a fun thing to do - inspect the problem, dissect the architecture, test your assumptions.
Same 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.
Watching House can help.
Except 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.
Watching 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.
It'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.