Debugging Teams

Acknowledgments

While there are two names on the cover, this book is the result of conversations we’ve had with hundreds if not thousands of people over the course of our lives and careers. We’d like to take a few moments to thank just a few of the people who are responsible for many of the useful parts of this book (mistakes, as usual, are all ours).

Thanks to the folks at O’Reilly Media: Mike Loukides for encouraging us to write for a broader audience, and our fearless editors Brian Anderson and Mary Treseler—this book wouldn’t exist without Mary’s encouragement, patience, and occasional prodding.

Thanks to Sunni Brown and Amber Lewis at http://sunnibrown.com for bringing our book to life with such delightful illustrations—working with you guys was a true joy.

Thanks to our technical reviewers who contributed numerous suggestions, ideas, and fixes that really brought the book together: Dustin Boswell, Trevor Foucher, Michael Hunger, Jonathan LeBlanc, Piaw Na, and Jack Welch. Thanks to our friends and colleagues who reviewed the book in progress and caught some of our more egregious mistakes: Dave Baum, Matt Cutts, Will Robinson, and Bill Duane. Thanks to our friends who listened, offered advice, and are just plain awesome: Karl Fogel, Jim Blandy, Matt Braithwaite, Danny Berlin, and Chris DiBona. Thanks also to Linda Stone, DeWitt Clinton, Bruce Johnson, Roland McGrath, and Amit Patel for ideas and suggestions.

Thanks to Google, and especially the Google Chicago engineering team, for their support, ideas, and suggestions, and for just plain being a fantastic group of people to work with every day.

Thanks especially to some of our senior mentors and teachers, a tiny bit of whose collective wisdom we’ve attempted to squeeze onto these pages: Bill Coughran, Steve Vinter, Alan Eustace, Stu Feldman, and Eric Schmidt.

Special thanks to Brian Robinson and Yvonne Ellison-Sandler for their mentoring, guidance, and tutelage.

Thanks to the Apache Software Foundation, not only for having us, but also for your focus on community and collaboration.

Thanks to all our close friends, who make us rich, rich men. Don’t look at us that way—you know who you are.

Huge swaths of this book were conceived, outlined, and written at the fabulous, friendly, and cozy Filter Cafe in our fair city of Chicago.

From Fitz

Huge thanks to my wife Marie for her encouragement, understanding, and patience—your insight and compassion are always an inspiration to me. Thanks to my mom for her support and enthusiasm, and thanks especially to my mother-in-law Rita Gumler, for her “people are like plants” analogy.

To Ben: after knowing each other for 16 years, working together at three jobs, and writing three books together, I have to say that I miss working with you every day. Thanks for taking this wild, weird, and wonderful ride with me—you’ve been a great friend and teacher.

Lastly, thanks to everyone that I’ve worked with in my (gulp) 21 years in software engineering. It’s been an incredible journey, and not a day has gone by where I didn’t learn something from one of you.

From Ben

There aren’t proper words to express my gratitude for the amount of space my wife Frances has given me—not just in writing this book, but in a dozen other creative projects I’ve taken on over the past few years. Without her quiet and rocklike support, none of them could possibly have happened.

To Fitz: now that we finish each other’s sentences I think it’s fair to say we’re like a very old married couple. I never knew it could be so much fun to give talks with somebody, let alone write software and books together. What an amazing set of opportunities we’ve been given! Thanks for teaching me so much.

Finally, thanks to all the crazy people and corporations of Silicon Valley: none of these crazy experiences could have happened if you hadn’t inducted me into your bizarro-world.

About the Authors

Brian Fitzpatrick is Founder and CTO of Tock. Brian started Google’s Chicago engineering office with Ben in 2005 and led several of Google’s global engineering efforts, including the Data Liberation Front, and Transparency Engineering. He also served as internal advisor for Google’s open data efforts, having previously led the Google Code and Google Affiliate Network teams. Prior to joining Google, Brian worked as an engineer at Apple, CollabNet, and a local Chicago development shop.

Brian has written numerous articles and given dozens of presentations, including cowriting Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well with Others, Version Control with Subversion (now in its second edition), and chapters for Unix in a Nutshell and Linux in a Nutshell.

Brian has an A.B. in Classics from Loyola University Chicago with a major in Latin, a minor in Greek, and a concentration in Fine Arts and Ceramics. He resides in Chicago.

Ben Collins-Sussman was one of the founding developers of the Subversion version control system. He cofounded Google’s engineering office in Chicago, launched Google Code, led two display advertising teams, and now manages teams that power Google’s search infrastructure. He’s currently the engineering Site Lead for Google Chicago, but also collects hobbies—including authoring interactive fiction, playing bluegrass banjo and jazz piano, composing musicals, operating ham radios, and exploring photography. Ben is a proud native of Chicago and holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Chicago with a major in Mathematics and minor in Linguistics. He still lives in Chicago with his wife, kids, and cats.