A thought on debugging

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 13:48:08 -0800

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

Brian W. Kernighan is attributed to that quote, and it (regularly) reasonates a lot with me.

I think sometimes as engineers, we actually like complexity. It feels fun to build something really interesting and technical in scope, and we often confuse simple topics like “simple”, “technical”, or even “beautiful”, “clean”, “elegant”…the list goes on.

Quotes on A Blog for the Uninitialized

A thought on debugging