I highly recommend checking out his YouTube channel [0]. He's an _incredibly_ thoughtful person and provides good lessons in staying focused and keeping scope down.
I consider him a mentor and his approach to software is something I really resonate with. He has a keen focus on software quality but understands he can't make everything perfect in one sitting. This approach helped me get away from decision paralysis in my projects and at work.
This isn't even mentioning how much I've learned about software in general from his videos. Whether it's debugging kernel bootstrap assembly, porting doom, writing a live feedback GUI editor, implementing syscalls, to messing around with the dynamic loader. He's really got a video for it all.
And he tackles each video with such clarity and careful consideration. I really can't speak higher of the man.
Nice tip, I started with something short - writing a screenshot utility:
Ed: i really enjoyed the video, but I feel it could have been even better (and shorter) if he used a proper debugger for the second part. But I don't know if that is available in the os.
The more I use a debugger, the more I realize I should use a debugger, and the earlier I should use a debugger.
Advice/directions to start early with a debugger might be the best part of Zed Shaws "Learn C the hard way". Eg:
https://github.com/zedshaw/learn-c-the-hard-way-lectures/blo...
(not a full featured chapter, but note that this is fairly early - exercise 4).
On a related note, it appears Shaw doesn't use the/any debugger at all in the ruby book, which is frankly quite crazy - ruby has great debuggers and repl. But that's a digression.
For a blog post that illustrate how one might do "debug driven" (or "debug first) development, see: https://nikhilism.com/post/2021/experiencing-smalltalk/
(Smalltalk and lisp does this very well - you can't AFAIK quite go that far with c++, but it's what all systems should aspire to, as a baseline (70s debug experience) ).
> Smalltalk and lisp does this very well - you can't AFAIK quite go that far with c++, but it's what all systems should aspire to, as a baseline (70s debug experience)
Actually that was were we were going to before Java took over the stage.
"Lucid Energize Demo VHS 1993"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk
https://dreamsongs.com/Cadillac.html
IBM also built on those ideas for the 4th release of Visual Age for C++.
http://www.edm2.com/0704/vacpp4/vacpp4.html
https://books.google.de/books?id=ZwHxz0UaB54C&pg=PA206&redir...
https://github.com/topazproject/topaz
From: "When a Mouse Eats a Python: Smalltalk-style Development for Python and Ruby" https://2017.programming-conference.org/details/MoreVMs-2017...
See also: http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/publications/index....
But it seems abandoned?
I guess maybe maglev ruby on the gemstone platform does move the needle a bit closer: