This week, whilst troubleshooting video encoding discrepancies for a film, I was reminded of the immense wizard power of debugging: the art of systematically bisecting your way to the root cause of a problem, then devising the cleanest fix.
This is an art that cannot be taught and which few professions lead you to learn. Even among those that do, such as computer programming, only the most diligent practitioners come to master it, because it is at once unnatural and primordial. We can be sure that many humans will never in their lives enact this discipline, but also that it is fundamental to our success as a species.
The master of debugging is like a master samurai wielding his blade. Each cut is deliberate, efficient, and advancing inexorably towards the crux. The enemy halved at each slice until only the truth of reality remains.
To safely cut with speed and precision requires a detailed map of the world and a taste for identifying the axiomatic truths upon which you can safely ground yourself, like the keen sense for which rocks make sure footing. Each step is deliberately and scrupulously chosen based on a lifetime of hard-won wisdom.
Each action is for its own sake and also practice for the next. Both solution and training.
Each assumption patiently vetted. Each hypothesis tested in isolation. Each moment a fluid progression of cuts and slices moving efficiently to the essence and to even greater mastery.
Attaining such powers is the work of ten thousand moments of deliberate practice and compounding self-betterment.
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