John Ashmead

Over 50% of software development time is spent debugging, but less than 0.5% of software titles are about debugging.

Zen and the Art of Debugging

A majority of software development time is usually spent in the debug phase (from 50 to 80% depending on whose estimates you prefer) yet the literature on debugging is surprisingly sparse. A search on amazon.com turned up 29108 titles with subject software but only 124 with subject debugging. So, over 50% of software development time is spent debugging, but less than .5% of software titles are about debugging. This seems disproportionate.

is therefore putting together a book on the general principles of debugging (tentatively titled "Zen and the Art of Debugging") to present in a concise and readable way the general principles of debugging.

The initial chapter list includes:

• Importance of debugging
• Brief history of debugging
• General principles of debugging
• Strategies for debugging
• Testing methodologies
• Preventive debugging
• Forensic debugging
• Debugging and security
• Extreme debugging: achieving a good factor of safety
• Future of debugging

One of the "principles of debugging" is that each individual practitioner's experience is partial: no one person sees -- or can see -- the whole elephant. will be posting the chapters on this web site, as they are "sufficiently" complete, in the hopes that the resulting feedback will help us give a more comprehensive treatment.

Acme Spaceships

has started an experimental ecommerce site, www.acmespaceships.com, to explore ecommerce issues in a relatively unstressed environment.

Maps & Data

is developing a Mapping & Data (mapsndata.com) application to help simplify the construction of infographics. The open source tool is being constructed using Javascript, Ruby-on-Rails, and PostgreSQL on a heroku stack.

Time and quantum mechanics

John Ashmead is completing his Ph.D. thesis in physics (Princeton). He is currently publishing individual chapters as papers, including "Uncollapsing the wave function" and "A Stern-Gerlach experiment in time".