Debugging Teams

You're a software engineer: you're great with computer languages, compilers, debuggers, and algorithms. But is that really all you need to be a successful software engineer? You certainly want these skills to be sufficient: in a perfect world, those who produce the best code should be the most successful.

"Should" is the operative word here, however. We do not live in this perfect world. We live in a world of people, and people are irrational, unpredictable, and imperfect. And you must work with people to get your job done. In fact, playing well with others is at least as important as having great technical skills.

In this entertaining book, Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman cover basic patterns and anti-patterns for working with other people, teams, and users while trying to develop software. This is valuable information from two respected software engineers whose popular series of talks—including "Working with Poisonous People"—has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers.

Brian W. Fitzpatrick is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and currently works for Google. He has been involved with Subversion in one way or another since its inception in early 2000. He is also the author of Version Control with Subversion.

Originally from New Orleans, Brian moved to Chicago to attend Loyola University where he received a degree in Latin and Greek.

Ben Collins-Sussman is one of the founding developers of the Subversion version control system, co-authored O'Reilly's "Version Control with Subversion" book as well as chapters for "Unix in a Nutshell" and "Linux in a Nutshell." Ben co-founded Google's engineering office in Chicago, ported Subversion to Google's Bigtable platform, led Google Code's Project Hosting team, and now manages the engineering team for the Google Affiliate Network. Ben collects hobbies which tend to explore the tension between art and science. He has given numerous talks about the social challenges of software development. He writes interactive fiction games and tools, and was the co-winner of the 15th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. He has co-authored several original musicals and received multiple awards for musical theater composition. He has an Extra-class FCC license for amateur radio, and also spends time learning DSLR photography and playing bluegrass banjo. Ben is a proud native of Chicago, and holds Bachelor of Science degree 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.