The Night Watch

In this article James Mickens writes about being a systems programmer. The writing is witty and funny. It’s not new, but it is new to me. A few choice quotes:

One time I tried to create a list<map>, and my syntax errors caused the dead to walk among the living. Such things are clearly unfortunate.

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Indeed, the common discovery mode for an impossibly large buffer error is that your program seems to be working fine, and then it tries to display a string that should say “Hello world,” but instead it prints “#a[5]:3!” or another syntactically correct Perl script

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However, when HCI people debug their code, it’s like an art show or a meeting of the United Nations. There are tea breaks and witticisms exchanged in French; wearing a non-functional scarf is optional, but encouraged.

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Do you see the difference between our lives? When you asked a girl to the prom, you discovered that her father was a cop. When I asked a girl to the prom, I DISCOVERED THAT HER FATHER WAS STALIN.

Empathy is a Technical Skill

Andrea Goulet writes an interesting article about empathy. The takeaway is that technical-minded folks should think of empathy as a skill that can be learned, and used effectively to achieve your aims. From experience, I can attest that increasing your empathy is like having a super power.

pg_flame

This project looks really promising. It formats the output of Postgres EXPLAIN ANALYZE as a flame graph, which can help in figuring out which parts of your queries are worth digging into.