Fighting the controls: madness and tragedy for programmers
summary
Debugging itself tends to induce loss of situational awareness by trapping developers in short try-again cycles, and aviation supplies concrete remedies: Air France Flight 447 (pitot tubes iced, ~60 seconds of bad sensor data, stall warnings ~80 times, 228 dead) shows how sensor confusion and hidden blind spots cascade. Tools that work for recovery are explicit checklist procedures, quick-reference handbooks, enforced readbacks, formal post-mortems, pair debugging, and automated testing; simple checklists (e.g. make sure you are in the right terminal window) actually prevent the predictable mistakes.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:24Tragedy and madness
- 7:13The case of Air France 447
- 11:52Time and memory in crisis
- 16:31Programming as a craft
- 21:02The nature of debugging
- 29:08Debugging as cognitive failure
- 33:35Mitigating cognitive breakdown
- 39:31Practical aviation strategies
- 46:13Learning to step back
- 51:57A culture of post-mortems
- 55:44Q&A and conclusion
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