“Release It!” and corporate computing fun
Amy picked up Michael Nygard’s Release It! for me, which is turning out to be a pretty good read. However, it’s also bringing back so many sour memories of operations blowouts from previous work with telecom and financial clients. In one example, a CxO is seen storming around the office asking whose head he can have on a platter for costing him his Caribbean vacation home. (His pay was based on performance, and his airline’s 3-hour overnight software outage, with cascading effects through the industry, could have diminished his year-end bonus.)
I dig how Nygard diagnosed this company’s outage — due to unhandled JDBC IOException errors — by decompiling the binaries, since everyone was terrified of being blamed and nobody dared even ask the development group to pony up the source code.
“The first clue [that this project was not going to be simple] was that nobody else could tell us what all the feeds were.” [p36]
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