Java

Yakov Fain writes (from experience) about good and bad aspects of Russian programmers for outsourcing. I left Russia well before American companies thought of trusting russian (or indian) programmers. But I remember the software and ingenious hacks written back then by my friends to work with limited computing resources available. I participated in programming competitions and summer camps, where school kids learned and applied concepts that are only taught on advanced level of university education in other countries.

I used to rave to everybody about how good ProcessExplorer from Sysinternals was for technical troubleshooting. Oops, I guess I was too loud. The new license terms state: A commercial license is required to use the software in any way not covered above, including for example: Use of the software for technical support on customer computers This license does appear in ProcessExplorer 10.05. The license is not yet in my other favourite tool (FileMon), but I assume it will get rolled out with the next release.

Russ Olsen (via Michael Baum) writes about tools to use in production, when ones does not have access to tools. Specifically, when one does not have access to tools like Eclipse IDE. He mentions a good list of tools, though he has a bit too much praise about Strace. To quote: Ever wonder why your program can’t open that one file? Use strace to find out precisely which file it is trying to open and the exact identity of the error.

Michael Baum quotes my feedback on his survey article, but completely misses that we actually want the same thing. We just approach it from different angles. To get to the (misunderstood) point: The notion that IT people need even more data generated by developers kinda misses the point. Troubleshooting production applications is a whole lot different that debugging code in development or staging environments. Production systems involve many technologies and systems that just don’t appear in pre-production environments.