5 ms·

Nice to see something I wrote 7 years ago hasn't gone entirely to waste. Spot the 'ancient' technologies like Solaris and perl mentioned there...

pjc50 9y ago
> I’m often asked in my technical troubleshooting job to solve problems that development teams can’t solve This sounds like a really interesting job - consultancy? How did you get started in it Strace was always my go-to on Linux for solving error messages that fail to be a complete sentence: "connection refused" (to what?) "file not found" (where did you look?) and so on. Since I've moved to Windows the best alternative seems to be Process Explorer.
- zwischenzug 9y ago
  I've moved on from there, but it was an internal function within a larger software dev house. In retrospect a pretty intense place to work, but I knew no different - it was effectively my first job out of uni. I got to that position after about 10 years. You can read more about my background here IYI: https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/10/15/my-20-year-experience-of-software-development-methodologies/ https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/10/15/my-20-year-experience-of...
- windowsworkstoo 9y ago
  Process Explorer uses ETW under the hood and you should too...learn this and become a Windows debugging master. Admittedly ProcExp will make you seem amazing as it is but harnessing ETW power will make you unstoppable
- techsupporter 9y ago
  > This sounds like a really interesting job - consultancy? I'm not OP but I do the same thing, solve the problems and bugs that the dev team can't. In my world, this is simply "Operations" or, in later years, "Systems Engineer." I'm really good at doing that but I am not at all skilled at large-scale software development even though I can read and understand already-written code as part of my troubleshooting. Descriptions like the author's are why I'm dismayed that Ops has such a bad reputation in the modern computing industry and why I'm not so keen on the combination of the two roles into "DevOps." Troubleshooting a working, in-motion system requires a different set of skills, in my experience, from writing and debugging code. It's also a set of skills that doesn't seem to overlap very often. The two roles go hand-in-hand, of course, but asking someone to do both in a large environment hasn't ended will (again, in my experience).
  - windowsworkstoo 9y ago
    Heh are you me? I too have the same problem with "DevOps" - I prefer to evangelise it as a culture of Developers and Operations/Engineering being able to work closely and collaboratively - two departments that have historically been at each others throats, with a mentality of "toss it over the wall and forget about it"
  - y4mi 9y ago
    There are countless definitions of devops around, but a developer that also does the ops part is one of the worst. Devops can also mean that you're developing automation to reduce manual maintenance or even remove some ops responsibilities entirely. Think of self healing clusters, auto provisioning and so on. I've also come across the the definition of devops as a traditional ops dude that just worked for the dev team, keeping their development environment maintained. I'm still confused why they called that a devops position...
  - devonkim 9y ago
    The anti-pattern / co-option of devops as a role is almost entirely overlapping with companies undergoing digital transformations and advised by some CIO magazine, Big Four, or Gartner team that it’s important for said transformation. Because the cultural transformation in itself is already being branded as something new and idiosyncratic to the company the term “devops” as the cultural change itself is dropped to avoid confusion. In most large non-tech companies operations is a cost center budgeted alongside facilities and basic costs of business and also usually run by managers less frequently with a software background as much as an IT or traditional business background focused around cost efficiencies. I’m not sure whether this designation or Taylorism is fundamentally the root causes for why “devops” from the cultural sense is not really happening.
  - voltagex_ 9y ago
    I'd love to get into this kind of work (currently in webdev, but I'm a good debugger). My contact details are in my profile - can we chat?
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > Troubleshooting a working, in-motion system requires a different set of skills, in my experience, from writing and debugging code I'm not convinced of this - or rather, if someone can't troubleshoot a system in motion, they're going to struggle to actually develop anything substantial. Debugging is a very underestimated skill of programming. I think the conflation of "devops" is nothing to do with skills and everything to do with culture. When you have them as separate business units or teams it becomes adversarial: every deployment is a potential headache for Ops, so Ops try to prevent deployments or set up staging barriers to minimise this. Whereas developers may not appreciate the difficulties involved in deploying a large system vs the toy one they're developing on.
agumonkey 9y ago
I remember a talk about strace (julia evans ?). Still it's rarely mentioned. It's quite useful and I found myself often seeking this kind of tools/mindset. Basically stop guessing in the void, use anything that pokes inside to give you evidence.
lucb1e 9y ago
Offtopic: does your username mean "between moves" or "between trains"? I guess the former because iirc it would be "züge" for the plural of trains. Or perhaps it's just "between-move" as a noun, but I have no clue what that would mean.
- y4mi 9y ago
  Technically, singular works as well. I.e a train that leaves between two others (either physically or timetable-wise) "Zug" is also a form of pull(ziehen). So it could also be interpreted as 'while pulling'. But that's pretty far fetched tbh I'm not the parent, however, and can't answer your question.
- monktastic1 9y ago
  Probably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwischenzug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwischenzug
  - lucb1e 9y ago
    Of course Wikipedia holds the answer. I should have known.
    - blub 9y ago
      Also see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugzwang https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugzwang
- zwischenzug 9y ago
  In between moves. I play chess, and I started the blog as 'in-between moves' outside of work days.
  - lucb1e 9y ago
    Cool! Thanks for clarifying :)
bmn__ 9y ago
To be fair, Perl emits a pretty good error message for the very common problem of a missing library and strace is generally not necessary to understand what's going on. > /usr/bin/perl -mblahlib Can't locate blahlib.pm in @INC (you may need to install the blahlib module) (@INC contains: /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.26.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.26.1 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.26.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.26.1 /usr/lib/perl5/5.26.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/5.26.1 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl). BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

pjc50 9y ago

> I’m often asked in my technical troubleshooting job to solve problems that development teams can’t solve This sounds like a really interesting job - consultancy? How did you get started in it Strace was always my go-to on Linux for solving error messages that fail to be a complete sentence: "connection refused" (to what?) "file not found" (where did you look?) and so on. Since I've moved to Windows the best alternative seems to be Process Explorer.

zwischenzug 9y ago
I've moved on from there, but it was an internal function within a larger software dev house. In retrospect a pretty intense place to work, but I knew no different - it was effectively my first job out of uni. I got to that position after about 10 years. You can read more about my background here IYI: https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/10/15/my-20-year-experience-of-software-development-methodologies/ https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/10/15/my-20-year-experience-of...
windowsworkstoo 9y ago
Process Explorer uses ETW under the hood and you should too...learn this and become a Windows debugging master. Admittedly ProcExp will make you seem amazing as it is but harnessing ETW power will make you unstoppable
techsupporter 9y ago
> This sounds like a really interesting job - consultancy? I'm not OP but I do the same thing, solve the problems and bugs that the dev team can't. In my world, this is simply "Operations" or, in later years, "Systems Engineer." I'm really good at doing that but I am not at all skilled at large-scale software development even though I can read and understand already-written code as part of my troubleshooting. Descriptions like the author's are why I'm dismayed that Ops has such a bad reputation in the modern computing industry and why I'm not so keen on the combination of the two roles into "DevOps." Troubleshooting a working, in-motion system requires a different set of skills, in my experience, from writing and debugging code. It's also a set of skills that doesn't seem to overlap very often. The two roles go hand-in-hand, of course, but asking someone to do both in a large environment hasn't ended will (again, in my experience).
- windowsworkstoo 9y ago
  Heh are you me? I too have the same problem with "DevOps" - I prefer to evangelise it as a culture of Developers and Operations/Engineering being able to work closely and collaboratively - two departments that have historically been at each others throats, with a mentality of "toss it over the wall and forget about it"
- y4mi 9y ago
  There are countless definitions of devops around, but a developer that also does the ops part is one of the worst. Devops can also mean that you're developing automation to reduce manual maintenance or even remove some ops responsibilities entirely. Think of self healing clusters, auto provisioning and so on. I've also come across the the definition of devops as a traditional ops dude that just worked for the dev team, keeping their development environment maintained. I'm still confused why they called that a devops position...
- devonkim 9y ago
  The anti-pattern / co-option of devops as a role is almost entirely overlapping with companies undergoing digital transformations and advised by some CIO magazine, Big Four, or Gartner team that it’s important for said transformation. Because the cultural transformation in itself is already being branded as something new and idiosyncratic to the company the term “devops” as the cultural change itself is dropped to avoid confusion. In most large non-tech companies operations is a cost center budgeted alongside facilities and basic costs of business and also usually run by managers less frequently with a software background as much as an IT or traditional business background focused around cost efficiencies. I’m not sure whether this designation or Taylorism is fundamentally the root causes for why “devops” from the cultural sense is not really happening.
- voltagex_ 9y ago
  I'd love to get into this kind of work (currently in webdev, but I'm a good debugger). My contact details are in my profile - can we chat?
- pjc50 9y ago
  > Troubleshooting a working, in-motion system requires a different set of skills, in my experience, from writing and debugging code I'm not convinced of this - or rather, if someone can't troubleshoot a system in motion, they're going to struggle to actually develop anything substantial. Debugging is a very underestimated skill of programming. I think the conflation of "devops" is nothing to do with skills and everything to do with culture. When you have them as separate business units or teams it becomes adversarial: every deployment is a potential headache for Ops, so Ops try to prevent deployments or set up staging barriers to minimise this. Whereas developers may not appreciate the difficulties involved in deploying a large system vs the toy one they're developing on.

agumonkey 9y ago

I remember a talk about strace (julia evans ?). Still it's rarely mentioned. It's quite useful and I found myself often seeking this kind of tools/mindset. Basically stop guessing in the void, use anything that pokes inside to give you evidence.

lucb1e 9y ago

Offtopic: does your username mean "between moves" or "between trains"? I guess the former because iirc it would be "züge" for the plural of trains. Or perhaps it's just "between-move" as a noun, but I have no clue what that would mean.

y4mi 9y ago
Technically, singular works as well. I.e a train that leaves between two others (either physically or timetable-wise) "Zug" is also a form of pull(ziehen). So it could also be interpreted as 'while pulling'. But that's pretty far fetched tbh I'm not the parent, however, and can't answer your question.
monktastic1 9y ago
Probably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwischenzug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwischenzug
- lucb1e 9y ago
  Of course Wikipedia holds the answer. I should have known.
  - blub 9y ago
    Also see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugzwang https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugzwang
zwischenzug 9y ago
In between moves. I play chess, and I started the blog as 'in-between moves' outside of work days.
- lucb1e 9y ago
  Cool! Thanks for clarifying :)

bmn__ 9y ago

To be fair, Perl emits a pretty good error message for the very common problem of a missing library and strace is generally not necessary to understand what's going on. > /usr/bin/perl -mblahlib Can't locate blahlib.pm in @INC (you may need to install the blahlib module) (@INC contains: /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.26.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.26.1 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.26.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.26.1 /usr/lib/perl5/5.26.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/5.26.1 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl). BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.