debugging

Earlier in my career I was working as a C# developer, and had read a lot about testing and testability from the Alt.Net crowd, a lose group of people with ideas outside of how Microsoft did things in C#. When I came to needing to write an API, the impossibility of testing in ASP.NET made me look elsewhere. ASP.NET made heavy usage of Annotations, where you add decorators to methods which at runtime are interpreted by a framework to add functionality, or configure how a function is used....

A system I am working on at the moment started giving errors occasionally, say 5 times out of 10,000 messages or so. The error was pretty straightforward: json: cannot unmarshal array into Go struct field Thing.Parts of type Parts The data structure it is referring to looks like this: type Thing struct { Parts Parts } type Parts struct { Part []Part } Which represents the (slightly weird) json structure we receive in a message:...

Many years ago, I was working on a dotnet Windows Forms application. The application had many issues overall: memory leaks, random crashes, data loss, and in this case, the “red x” problem. The problem showed up at random, and instead of a window, dialogue, or control being rendered, it would be replaced with a white box with a red outline and red diagonal cross, and I think some error text in one corner, saying something about GDI handles....