Synthesis Studios

Sometimes the stuff that we build at Synthesis runs in the weirdest places. We love working on the boundary of the digital world and the real world; that means that very few of the things we create are intended for the “usual suspects” like web browsers, servers, or mobile phones. Because of that, debugging said software in said weird places becomes an interesting exercise. I got a cold realization of that last week when I spent a day climbing around a bus with an oscilloscope.

Synthesis has had the past privilege of working with some very interesting companies trying to define the market of “in-car computing.” While the notions sound so simple and grand (a processor in every seat, pervasive media access, high-speed cellular linking the automobile to the world) the real deal of properly getting the bits running are so different than getting them to run on the aforementioned usual suspects. Debugging a question such as “How did that function get called?” means something very different when you’re sitting in a car.

For example: “How did that function get called?” That’s always a fun one no matter where you’re trying to look at software. Engineers spend countless hours with debuggers inspecting code and trying to figure it all out — did the author get all his if-then-else statements right? Did the author have another bug in the code?

In my case, it was neither. It was a wire that came loose, fell down, and shorted something out. Its reminds me so much of why these errors are called software bugs.

At Synthesis we consider ourselves to be lucky — we get called upon to write code that goes in really “different” environments. It really gives us a chance to stretch our brains, arms, freeze a bit in the cold, and have warm, fuzzy, analytical thoughts about true systems.