Dr. Nesson

I only just realized I haven’t actually introduced the role I invented, the driving motivation behind even starting this blog: Dr. Nesson1.

You see, I’m really good at figuring out bugs. Like, implausibly good at it. Good enough that I often fall back on describing it as “like bad writing”—the kind of thing where if you saw it on TV, it’d take you out of it, like that one CSI episode where two people were typing on the same keyboard as they tried to stop a hacker.

I’m good enough at it that, for stretches of my later few years at Tableau, it was literally my entire job: figure out problems no one else could figure out, and (ideally) explain it to whoever owns the code in question, so they could fix it.

Think of it like Dr. House, from House M.D. He’s a diagnostician, specializing in weird, obscure problems. He’s implausibly good at piecing together exactly the right facts to identify whatever weird, obscure thing is going wrong, and then he hands treatment off to specialists for whatever that happens to be.

Alternately, it’s like Law & Order: you have a detective who investigates the crime, collects evidence, and builds a case, then they hand that case off to a prosecutor to resolve it. Though in practice, I often ended up finding myself turning more into Columbo than anyone from Law & Order, but the point remains: letting someone who’s very good at investigating handle the investigation and then having them hand off their findings to someone who actually knows the relevant code results in dramatically quicker turnaround times on especially pernicious defects.

A friend of mine once encouraged me to create a scrapbook of the various bugs I’d encountered, but I’m not really the crafty sort. So I’m going to write some of them up in a series of articles on here, instead.

  1. For the record, I have Tristan Moss to thank for taking my pie-in-the-sky, “this would be cool but would never actually happen” idea of separating investigation and resolution and turning it into a reality. It was on his recommendation that, instead of calling it “Dr. House, but for bugs,” we called it “Dr. Nesson.” ↩︎