remote 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.

Stuart Halloway of Cognitect argues for debugging with the scientific method: form hypotheses, try to falsify them, and write everything down. The talk is given to the Clojure community but applies to any language.

Paul Irish's Chrome Dev Summit 2016 talk surveys the state of the art in Chrome DevTools debugging. It covers workspaces, diffs, CSS coverage, Node debugging, editor improvements and Lighthouse.

Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek present their DEF CON 23 talk on remotely compromising an unmodified Jeep, pivoting from the entertainment system to the vehicle's internal networks to send control messages. They aim to show the reality of car hacking.

Bryan Cantrill's GOTO Chicago 2017 talk on debugging production systems under pressure, centered on the incident where an operator's mistyped command rebooted an entire Joyent datacenter. It covers human factors, automation and architecture.

Greg Law's 15-minute CppCon 2015 lightning talk shows what GDB can do beyond basic use, including its text user interface and reverse debugging.

Bruce Waggoner of the Voyager team describes how engineers diagnosed Voyager 1's 2023 loss of telemetry and patched its flight software from 15 billion miles away. The talk covers the spacecraft's architecture and the scarcity of old documentation.

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.

Paul Irish and Pavel Feldman present the newest Chrome Dev Tools features at Google I/O 2011, including live CSS editing, saving changes, breakpoints and network analysis. It also covers remote debugging.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2018 keynote on preventing, finding and fixing bugs under a time budget. He covers testing practice, type annotation tradeoffs and the limits of coverage metrics.

Dan Abramov live-codes hot reloading with time-travel debugging at React Europe 2015, debuting Redux and its devtools. The slides themselves are driven by application state.

A reverse engineer walks through fixing a ten-year-old bug in Guitar Hero III without access to its source code, using a disassembler and decompiler. It is technical but explained step by step.

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.

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

Bryan Cantrill's Uptime 2017 talk on the engineering challenges of the stateful data path, including storage, firmware and hardware bugs. It uses the 'zebras vs. horses' diagnostic heuristic to explain why rare failures keep appearing.

Bret Victor's talk from Dropbox's DBX conference about living by a guiding principle, in his case that creators need an immediate connection to what they are making. He shows live-coding and time-manipulation demos that let ideas take form at the speed of thought.

Netanel Rubin's 31C3 talk chains Perl's syntax quirks into a powerful remote code execution attack, taking down popular Perl-based projects.

Jesse Newland describes how GitHub uses Hubot, its chat bot, to run operations such as deployment, monitoring, graphing and provisioning from chat rooms. He explains how this improves shared awareness and remote work culture.

Aaron Boodman of Replicache asks why sync engines have not yet fixed web app complexity and what is missing for them to go mainstream. The talk lays out the ideas that led to the Zero sync engine.

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.