A glitch is more precisely a software bug that is hard to reproduce. But it has also been used to mean a software bug that is not very serious.
Debugging sucks. But there's also nothing quite that "oh fuck, that's why it doesn't work" moment, which happens after you have examined and placed everything that is relevant to the problem into your brain. You just can't see it coming. It just happens. You just learn what you generally have to look at so it happens faster.
This is a simple hierarchical plaintext notation Ciro Santilli created to explain programs to himself.
It is usuall created by doing searches in an IDE, and then manually selecting the information of interest.
It attempts to capture intuitive information not only of the call graph itself, including callbacks, but of when things get called or not, by the addition of some context code.
For example, consider the following pseudocode:Supose that we are interested in determining what calls
f1() {
}
f2(i) {
if (i > 5) {
f1()
}
}
f3() {
f1()
f2_2()
}
f2_2() {
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
f2(i)
}
}
main() {
f2_2()
f3()
}f1.Then a reasonable call hierarchy for
f1 would be:f2(i)
if (i > 5) {
f1()
f2_2()
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
f2(i)
main
f3
f3()
main()Some general principles:
One of the Holiest age old debugging techniques!
Git has some helpers to help you achieve bisection Nirvana: stackoverflow.com/questions/4713088/how-to-use-git-bisect/22592593#22592593
Obviously not restricted to software engineering alone, and used in all areas of engineering, e.g. Video "Air-tight vs. Vacuum-tight by AlphaPhoenix (2020)" uses it in vacuum engineering.
What it adds on top of reverse debugging: not only can you go back in time, but you can do it instantaneously.
Or in other words, you can access variables from any point in execution.
Just add GDB Dashboard, and you're good to go.
The best open source implementation as of 2020 seems to be: Mozilla rr.
- stackoverflow.com/questions/1206872/go-to-previous-line-in-gdb/46996380#46996380
- stackoverflow.com/questions/1470434/how-does-reverse-debugging-work/53063242#53063242
- stackoverflow.com/questions/3649468/setting-breakpoint-in-gdb-where-the-function-returns/46116927#46116927
- stackoverflow.com/questions/27770896/how-to-debug-a-rare-deadlock/50073993#50073993
- stackoverflow.com/questions/522619/how-to-do-bidirectional-or-reverse-debugging-of-programs/50074106#50074106 link only, marked as duplicate of go to previous line
- softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/181527/why-is-reverse-debugging-rarely-used
Proprietary extension to Mozilla rr by rr lead coder Robert O'Callahan et. al, started in 2016 after he quit Mozilla.
TODO what does it add to
rr?The musical study of software engineering.
Ciro Santilli is obsessed by those in order to learn any new concept, not just for bug reporting.
This includes to learn more theoretical subjects like physics and mathematics.
One of the sequencers made by Oxford Nanopore Technologies.
The device has had several updates since however, notably of the pore proteins which are present in the critical flow cell consumable.
Official documentation: nanoporetech.com/products/minion (archive)
The following images of the device and its peripherals were taken during the experiment: Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it".
Top view of a closed Oxford Nanopore MinION
. Source. 
Side view of an Oxford Nanopore MinION
. Source. 
Top view of an open Oxford Nanopore MinION
. Source. 
They are evil because they produce closed source offline software used by millions: Microsoft Windows.
And also their monopolistic practices: United States v. Microsoft Corp.
So, as put in Video "Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs by Epic Rap Battles of History (2012)" by fake Steve Jobs to fake Bill Gates:
However, like all big tech companies with infinite money, they do end up doing some cool things in their research department, Microsoft Research, notably for Ciro Santilli being:
- Lean
- their quantum computing work. C is of course a bad idea, we don't need yet another domain-specific language, Python library based solutions like Qiskit are obviously the way to go
How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it Why Oxford Nanopore was used instead of Illumina for the sequencing by 
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16At the time of the experiment, Illumina equipment was cheaper per base pair and dominates the human genome sequencing market, but it required a much higher initial investment for the equipment (TODO how much).
The reusable Nanopore device costs just about 500 dollars, and about 500 dollars (50 unit volume) for the single usage flow cell which can decode up to 30 billion base pairs, which is about 10 human genomes 1x! Note that 1x is basically useless for one of the most important of all applications of sequencing: detection of single-nucleotide polymorphisms, since the error rate would be too high to base clinical decisions on.
Compare that to Illumina which is currently doing about an 1000 dollar human genome at 30x, and a bit less errors per base pair (TODO how much).
Other advantages of the MinION over Illumina which didn't really matter to this particular experiment are:
- portability for e.g. to do analysis on the field near infections outbreaks. Compare that to the smallest Illumina sequencer currently available in 2019, the iSeq 100: Figure 1. "Illumina iSeq 100 DNA sequencer".
- long reads which can be necessary for long repetitive regions, see also: Section "Sequence alignment"
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact