Richard Sites - Understanding Software Dynamics

Dick Sites approaches problem-solving in a way that is shockingly rare these days: he finds it almost personally offensive to make guesses, and instead he insists on understanding a phenomenon before trying to fix it. When faced with the complexity of modern computer systems, including their hardware and software, most programmers approach performance debugging armed with a hunch about what is happening and proceed to try this, try that with the hope that this might yield a shortcut to a solution. Those of us who use this method are implicitly giving up on the possibility of truly grasping the complex interactions that could cause a program to underperform. The idea that something computer related is beyond understanding certainly doesnt occur to Dick. Often it is the case that basic tools that provide telemetry on a programs behavior are missing. In those cases Dick does the obvious thing (for Dick), which is to build them, including the visualization framework that compresses essential information about program execution into readable charts that shine a bright light into program dynamics.

When you go through Dicks remarkable career, it becomes clear why he is confident in his ability to understand complex computing systems. He became a programmer at age 10 in 1959, and his curiosity about computing resulted in a career where he studied or worked closely with giants of our field such as Fran Allen, Fred Brooks, John Cocke, Don Knuth, and Chuck Seitz, to name just a few. His accomplishments in industry are impressively broad: from co-designing the DEC Alpha Architecture to working on Adobes Photoshop and speeding up Google web services such as Gmail.

When I met Dick (joining DEC in 1995), he was already a legend of our field, and I had the unique pleasure of spending time with him during his Google tenure and witnessed his problem-solving approach firsthand. Readers of this book will delight in the clarity of Dicks writing and how performance debugging problems are described as mysteries to be solved through his knowledge of hardware/software interactions and sequences of clues unveiled by observing detailed traces of program execution. This is a book that will be immensely useful for programmers and computer designers alike, in no small part because there is no other book to compare it with. It is as unique as its author.

Luiz Andr Barroso, Google Fellow