Root Cause
Mentioned once across 1 show · first heard Mar 2026 on Digital Social Hour.
The general take
Anthony Mikalauskas praises Root Cause as a well-made documentary, highlighting that it was filmed in 2018 and tells the story of a film producer in his twenties who had a root canal after losing a tooth, with the narrative extending decades into his life. He seems impressed by the quality of the filmmaking itself.
About
The Software Engineering industry often evaluates engineers based on how many lines of code they write, how many years of experience they have, or how many features they ship. But I think a more powerful metric is the number of bugs they encountered, reproduced, traced to their root cause and fixed. Those experiences shape an engineer far more than raw output or time served in my opinion, let me elaborate. Bugs hinder the stability of software, which affects the user experience. You may have a feature-complete product, but if it has bugs preventing users from completing tasks, the user experience suffers. You may have a modern software stack, but if the system isn’t performing or stable, that too indirectly affects the user experience. Root Cause is a collection of dozens of real-world software bugs drawn from nearly two decades of my personal backend engineering experience.
Who said what
- AM
Anthony Mikalauskas👍 Recommends
…documentary about how root canals cause serious chronic illness and disease
“There's a great documentary. It's called a root cause. Um, and it's, uh, uh, it's actually really well done. It was actually filmed in 2018. It was a, there's a, uh, a pro he was actually a film producer and, uh, in his twenties, he, uh, had his tooth knocked out and they, they did a root canal on his front tooth. And then like fast forward, like, you know, 30 years later, the guy's a, you know, prominent, uh, you know, producer in Hollywood and stuff.”
Digital Social Hour — Why Your Toothbrush Could Be Making You Sick... | Anthony Mikalauskas | DSH #1873at 03:42
Listener reviews
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