Wednesday, March 12, 2003

Omniscient Debugger: debugging java code will never be the same ! Omniscient Debugger Did I say the big P word yet ? "Paradigm Shift" :-) I think it applies very well to this new debugging tool and the technique described. This link was sent to me by a friend from Sun and I had no time to install it yet, but the docs and paper just blew me out ! Bil Lewis created a java debugger that records a program run, and then lets you navigate through the collected data forward and backward in time, following different navigation paths, and looking at all state at each moment. This is the most original idea I've seen in the area of debugging during my short (8 years) career as a professional programmer. "Omniscient Debugging is the idea of collecting "time stamps" at each "point of interest" (setting a value, making a method call, throwing/catching an exception) in a program and then allowing the programmer to use those time stamps to explore the history of that program run. The ODB is an implementation of this idea written in Java. It inserts code into the .class files to collect these stamps and when the program runs, time stamps are recorded." I look forward to play with it. 3:17:03 PM    comment []

What did Carlos do to his life when he decided to start his own company ? Hilarious, sad and scary post. What did you did to your life, dammit? Carlos' schizophrenic conversation with himself about starting his own company instead of "fooling yourself with this sucky job of coding EJBs everyday and knowing they'll not even be used, as the whole project your're working on will die a horrible death sooner or later", and the consequences after he makes the move: no contracts, no money. His text is very rich. It is at the same time hilarious, his observations being very accurate, scary because it's exactly what most programmers-would-be-entrepreneur entertaining the idea of quitting their well paying boring day job to go create cool open source software and get money doing consulting around it, fear will happen if they take the step. Then it is extremely sad that his efforts failed and he is obliged to go back to a normal day job: the people at JBoss Group who sustain the open source app server development with fees for consulting and documentation offered us all a ray of hope that a new business model is possible for software development. Carlos' story shows that it does not work for everyone. 10:33:24 AM    comment []