debugging

Ron Garret tells the story of the Remote Agent Experiment on NASA's Deep Space 1, where autonomous software controlled a spacecraft in 1999. He describes debugging Lisp code remotely from millions of miles away.

Bryan Cantrill's 2007 Google Tech Talk on DTrace, showing how dynamic tracing improves debugging of both development and live production systems. It includes a vivid war story about tracking down a problem on a Sun Ray server.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk in which Bryan Cantrill demonstrates DTrace and explains how it improves debugging of both development and live production systems.

JPL's David Cummings presents at the 2025 Flight Software Workshop how the team diagnosed and fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 anomaly from billions of miles away. It walks through the flight computer and the memory fix.

Ian Cooper's DevTernity talk revisits Kent Beck's original TDD ideas and shows where misunderstandings crept in. It argues tests should target behaviors through public interfaces rather than implementation details, so suites support refactoring instead of resisting it.

Rafal Dittwald's Clojure/north talk shows how to move from writing Java-style code in Clojure to thinking in data-driven, functional terms. He walks through a JavaScript example, refactoring imperative code step by step into a functional core.

Linus Torvalds gives a Google tech talk on git, the source control system he created two years earlier. He argues for distributed version control over centralized systems such as CVS and Subversion.

A thoughtbot meetup talk by Max Cantor on getting most of what popular plugins provide using only built-in Vim features. It covers autocomplete, file jumping, filesystem navigation, build integration and snippets, with slides and a vimrc available.

A lecture from MIT's Missing Semester course covering version control with git. It builds up git from its data model rather than from commands.

A Linux.conf.au 2013 talk that explains git's internal model using a playful, toy-based approach. It presents git operations as operations on a graph of commits, aimed at people who find git confusing.

Titus Winters' CppCon 2017 talk argues for C++ and Google's Abseil to be maintained as a live at head language, relying on testing and automated tooling rather than never changing or promising no compatibility. It covers Hyrum's law and the limits of semantic versioning.

Matt Godbolt's CppCon 2017 talk shows what modern compilers do with your C++ code, using Compiler Explorer to inspect generated assembly. It covers surprising optimizations and how the tool works.

Vim creator Bram Moolenaar's 2007 Google Tech Talk on habits for efficient text editing. He explains how to spot repetition and inefficiency, then use editor features to fix it.

Joran Dirk Greef's Systems Distributed '23 talk on TigerStyle, the engineering methodology behind TigerBeetle. It covers designing safer systems in less time through up-front design, assertions, and deterministic simulation.

David Kriesel's 31C3 talk, in German, on the discovery that Xerox scanner-copiers silently replace digits and letters in scanned documents. He explains how the bug stayed unnoticed in the wild for years.

Science writer Jay Dixit explains how he uses Emacs as a non-programmer to write, edit and research more productively. He shows his plain-text writing workflow and what led him from tools like Scrivener to Emacs.

Steve Yegge's Stanford seminar on GROK, Google's internal large-scale, cross-language source code analysis system. It covers how the system helps with code search and understanding across Google's huge codebase.

J. B. Rainsberger argues that large integrated tests are a scam: they are slow, fail opaquely, and give a false sense of coverage. He advocates focused collaboration and contract tests at boundaries instead.

Scott Chacon introduces Git by showing what happens under the hood for basic commands: staging, committing, data storage, branching, merging and pushing. He contrasts it with Subversion and shows history viewing with log.

SQLite author Richard Hipp's talk at SouthEast LinuxFest criticizing Git's workflow and introducing Fossil as an alternative. He lists Git enhancements and argues for keeping history intact.

A one-hour OCaml Workshop 2020 talk on the state of the OCaml Platform, covering IDE support, next steps for the tooling and plans for 2020-2021.

Elias Martenson presents his Emacs-based workflow for building a web application (the Potato chat platform) with Common Lisp on the backend and ClojureScript on the frontend. He demonstrates SLIME, Paredit, CIDER and debugger-driven interactive development. The talk is 79 minutes and was given at Emacs SG.

Vim author Bram Moolenaar's 2007 Google Tech Talk on habits for efficient text editing: find inefficiencies in your own editing, then learn the Vim commands that fix them.

A Lex Fridman podcast conversation with the four creators of Cursor, the AI-assisted code editor. They discuss how the editor integrates models into programming workflows, including custom completion models and techniques like speculative decoding to speed up applying edits.

Google engineers describe Google's internal build system, a unified, language-agnostic system used across the company. It was presented as a 2012 NYC tech talk.

Chandler Carruth's GoingNative 2012 talk on Clang, covering how the compiler helps defend C++ code from mistakes. It makes the case for Clang's diagnostics and tooling.

Perry Metzger, an Emacs user since 1983, gives a talk on why he has used one editor for decades. It mixes history, philosophy and speculation about Emacs's future, and teaches some Emacs fundamentals.

In a long live-coding session, Andreas Kling works on making the Cookie Clicker game playable in the Ladybird browser from SerenityOS. He tracks down bugs in the browser engine and fixes them.

Lennart Augustsson's CUFP 2011 keynote covers using Haskell commercially at Standard Chartered Bank. He discusses non-standard Haskell implementations, including a strict dialect, and weighs strict against lazy evaluation.