Comment by bcantrill
6 days ago
I was! (Along with co-author Dave Pacheco.) And I still have the dream that we'll finish it one day: we had written probably a third of it, but then life intervened in various dimensions. And indeed, as part of our preparation to write our book (which we titled The Joy of Debugging), we read Wheeler's Debugging. On the one hand, I think it's great to have anything written about debugging, as it's a subject that has not been treated with the weight that it deserves. But on the other, the "methodology" here is really more of a collection of aphorisms; if folks find it helpful, great -- but I came away from Debugging thinking that the canonical book on debugging has yet to be written.
Fortunately, my efforts with Dave weren't for naught: as part of testing our own ideas on the subject, I gave a series of presentations from ~2015 to ~2017 that described our thinking. A talk that pulls many of these together is my GOTO Chicago talk in 2017, on debugging production systems.[0] That talk doesn't incorporate all of our thinking, but I think it gets to a lot of it -- and I do think it stands at a bit of contrast to Wheeler's work.
It's a great talk! I have stolen your "if you smell smoke, find the source" advice and put it in some of my own talks on the subject.