Explorations in software troubleshooting
A system is a point of view – natural for a poet, yet terrifying for a scientist. Gerald Weinberg, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, page 52. Up until this point, I haven’t really addressed the idea of “a system” directly, but systems are implicit in all of these discussions. A “system” is the thing …
When I think about the practices that have helped me the most in hacking trouble, I find that they fall into three broad categories. These three categories form the troublehacker’s triangle: Let’s start at the top of the triangle, with mental models. When I reflect on problems I’ve solved in the past, I distinctly recall …
This is a blog about broken things. After all, most of the software systems I work with are broken. To be fair, I’m usually the one breaking them so I’m not complaining. When I work as a system or performance tester, that’s part of the job description. You’ve got to push the limits of the …