Imagine you’re designing a high performance system. What hardware would you use? Would you use only general purpose CPUs? Probably not, you’d also use GPUs. As high performing engineers, we also need to move beyond our general purpose hardware and leverage specialty hardware. But our general purpose hardware is not an Intel Xeon W-3275M CPU, it’s the part of our brain that handles abstract reasoning. Our specialized hardware is not an AMD Radeon RX 5700 graphics card. It's our eyeballs and visual cortex.
To understand how to debug with our eyeballs, we'll walk through a real world example of using eyeballs to debug, and afterwards learn from it.
This actually happened
A friend of mine is going through the greatest programming book of all time. And like any good engineer, he wrote a bug. He knew there was something wrong in a “cond” statement, but he didn’t know what. (Although the following code is written in Scheme, the less you understand about the following code, the more you’ll appre…