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Debugging
I always tell my students, the debugger is your 'get out of jail free card' when working on a project. I say the same thing to professionals, debuggers are your 'get out of free jail card'. The reality is that programmers spend the majority of their time debugging as opposed to writing new code. Unfortunately many programmers do not learn how to use a debugger, or otherwise how they should approach debugging. In this talk I am going to show you how to debug C++ code, starting from the very basics and then demonstrating how a debugger like GDB can be used to help you track errors in CPU code. Attendees at this talk will learn names of debugging techniques (e.g. delta debugging), and I will demonstrate several debugging tools (stepping through code, capturing backtraces, conditional breakpoints, scripting, and even time traveling!) to demonstrate the power of debuggers. This is a beginner friendly talk where we are going to start from the beginning, but I suspect I may show a trick or two that folks with prior experience will appreciate.
Mike Shah
Mike Shah is an Associate Teaching Professor at Northeastern University in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. His primary teaching interests are in computer systems, computer graphics, and software engineering. His research interests are related to performance engineering (dynamic analysis), software visualization, and computer graphics. Along with teaching and research work, he have juggled occasional consulting work as a 3D Senior Graphics Engineer in C++.
Mike discovered computer science at the age of 13 when googling ”how do I make games”. From that google search, Mike has worked as a freelance game developer, worked in industry for Intel, Sony Playstation, Oblong Industries, and researched at The Ohio Supercomputer Center to name a few. Mike cares about building tools to help programmers monitor and improve the performance of realtime applications– especially games. In Michael’s spare time he is a long distance runner, weight lifter, and amateur pizza maker.