Dive into the source

If you have been following this blog, it should be no surprise that I listen to the Maintainable podcast. It is a great resource. The other day I was listening and I heard a clip that really spoke to me.

Justin Searls is talking about debugging and not being afraid to dive into source code to find problems instead of just simply googling. He is talking in the context of Ruby and Gems, which would be the equivalent of VIPM packages. What he is advocating would be the equivalent of you using some VIPM package and when you find a problem with it actually taking the time to dive into the source code in vi.lib and debug it, as opposed to simply googling the answer or just submitting a bug report. How many of us actually take the time to do that?

I had the opportunity to do that recently. I was using AsciiDoc on a Real-Time project. The DQMH modules on the Real-Time target weren’t showing up. I could have just filled out a bug report and waited for Olivier to fix it, but that would have taken a while. Instead, I dug into the code in .vilib, found the bug and was able to fix it locally and get my documentation report generated in a few minutes. I did of course then fill out a bug report along with my suggested solution so that Olivier can include the fix in the next version. If you are using AsciiDoc with LabVIEW RT, you will want to take a look at the bug report. It spells out the workaround.