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7
Change One Thing at a Time
“They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains. It’s a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.”
—SHERLOCK HOLMES, A STUDY IN SCARLET
War Story. One weekend, we asked a debugging whiz to work with one of our software engineers. The engineer had been struggling to debug a system that moved audio data around a computer, through audio-processing hardware and software “pipes,” including another company’s software, and finally sent it out through a speaker. The sound came out bad, of course; otherwise they’d have been out doing fun weekend things. As the data went through the system, at various points it was packaged up into chunks, with some extra “framing” bits added to define ...
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