Try It Now!

Try It Now!

Here is a funny Kids In The Hall episode from the 90s. Trying to start their car.

Guessing. Trial and error. Testing ridiculous things clearly unrelated to the problem. Funny!

Does it remind you of any tech people that you work with?!

Failure To Do Data Analysis

Databases are all about, data.

So it’s totally bizarre how so many people working with databases never look at the data!

It’s really so fundamental, it’s hard to make a good analogy.  Imagine a tailor making your clothes, but never looked at the fabrics!  Can you think of a better analogy?

I’ve met programmers who have charged ahead and written one thousand lines of code, and have not even looked at either the data in the tables, the input, or the output!

Poor Or No Error Trapping

More Architecture Mistakes To Avoid

One thing that should be blatantly obvious to anyone who has ever had to fix some code on the weekend, or in the middle of the night, is the importance of excellent error trapping and logging routines.

When you need to fix something, now, you don’t want to be reverse engineering the code or the whole system.  You want to know what happened, and what to do.  Now.

You need what I call, instantly digestible error messages.  I don’t want to hunt it. I don’t want to kill it.  I don’t want to clean it.  I don’t want to cook it.  I just want to eat it.  I want both the cause, and the solution, in the same message.

The error trapping routine must be totally reliable.   Let me list some strange things that I’ve seen in production.

Complex and Useless: