Plug-In Architectures & Debugging Nightmares
I was checking my meager blog stats over on StatCounter (which I recommend) trying to figure out how the 2 people that read my site today arrived there. As a quick aside, if you ever want to get more people coming to your blog you should write a lot about cell phones (like this guy). Just over half of my search engine hits are the result of a quick post on making a Ms. Pacman ringtone. The breakdown by search engine wasn't what I expected either: 66% Yahoo!, 23% MSN, 9% Google.
Anyway, I'm off subject. I eventually wound up at my Google AdSense account wondering about my inability to get good clickthrough. I'm sure pathetic traffic is a part of that. Well, I went to my site and noticed that the ads didn't show up. I went through a few minutes of "debugging" before realizing that my AdBlock extension (with FilterSet.G thanks to Matt Ray) was doing its job very well. Long story short, my ads show up–my clickthrough and traffic just suck.
That brings me to my final stupid point: in the land of integration, the debugging man is king. With SOA (sorry to re-use the over-used, ill-understood acronym, but at least I didn't say Web 2.0), various plug-in architectures, and numerous open source data/communication standards out there it is clear that integration is in your face to the extreme. With that being the case, all of this unforeseen integration is going to lead to bugs (as all things do). The problem will be with 50 unrelated parties molding the final data at 50 different integration points you had better have an architecture made for debugging, a set of tools that give you full control of the chain of events leading to the final data and allow your support staff to do it remotely, and a person that doesn't have their head up their ass. So, if the little children were to ask me today what skill I thought would be most valuable in the economy of the future (as they so often do), I would say, "It's hacking and debugging." They of course would point out that that could be considered two skills and they only asked for one. And that's where the violence comes in…
December 16th, 2005 at 1:07 pm
Indeed. I think the secret of all computer work — programming and IT — is that at the end of the day, what you need the most often is good debugging. Good code is a great thing to have, but being able to solve problems (debugging) is what distinguishes the good computer people from the average ones.
December 16th, 2005 at 1:19 pm
Absolutely true. As I know you know, however, there's a level beyond that which is not just to know how to debug, but to know how to code for debugging. Which of course is very rare.
July 31st, 2008 at 3:59 pm
[...] I had AdBlock installed. The sad thing is this isn't the first time something like this has happened to me. Perhaps the third time will be the [...]