Episode #461 from 1:30:27
Printf() debugging
Yeah. Can you actually speak to the print off debugging. You walk into a system and there's a lot of systems in the world like this. Twitter was like this, when Elon acquired Twitter and the rolls in and there's this old junky code base that's just like a giant mess, and you have to basically do print off debugging. What's the process of going into a code base and figuring out what the fuck? Well, how does this work? What are the flaws? What are the assumptions? You have to reverse engineer what all these other engineers did in the past and the mess across the space of months and years, and you have to figure out how all that works in order to make improvements. I've always just been good at print off debugging because one of my first kind of side quest jobs that I got was writing robots for the government when I was still at school. And so I'd kind of do this contractually for so many hours a week. And my boss, Hunter Lloyd, great professor by the way, he just said, "Hey, here's your computer, here's the robot, here's how you plug it in. Here's how you run the code. Can you write the flash driver, the ethernet driver. Can you write the planetary pancake motor? Here's some manuals, I'm missing some. Just figure it out, I'll be back." So that was government work for me. So I was like, okay, I'll figure all these things out. And I figured them all out and the only way to really get anything out of the machine was to print. And so it's like I had to become really good at printing my way through problems. And so that kind of became this skill I guess I adopted is that I can just kind of print off debug my way through a lot of these problems.
Why this moment matters
Yeah. Can you actually speak to the print off debugging. You walk into a system and there's a lot of systems in the world like this. Twitter was like this, when Elon acquired Twitter and the rolls in and there's this old junky code base that's just like a giant mess, and you have to basically do print off debugging. What's the process of going into a code base and figuring out what the fuck? Well, how does this work? What are the flaws? What are the assumptions? You have to reverse engineer what all these other engineers did in the past and the mess across the space of months and years, and you have to figure out how all that works in order to make improvements. I've always just been good at print off debugging because one of my first kind of side quest jobs that I got was writing robots for the government when I was still at school. And so I'd kind of do this contractually for so many hours a week. And my boss, Hunter Lloyd, great professor by the way, he just said, "Hey, here's your computer, here's the robot, here's how you plug it in. Here's how you run the code. Can you write the flash driver, the ethernet driver. Can you write the planetary pancake motor? Here's some manuals, I'm missing some. Just figure it out, I'll be back." So that was government work for me. So I was like, okay, I'll figure all these things out. And I figured them all out and the only way to really get anything out of the machine was to print. And so it's like I had to become really good at printing my way through problems. And so that kind of became this skill I guess I adopted is that I can just kind of print off debug my way through a lot of these problems.