A few years ago, I was working on a project for a UK client who needed to replace or rewrite a legacy inventory management web application written in classic ASP. The problem: no documentation, and complicated, spaghetti source code with many apparently duplicate or redundant ASP files and ASMX web service endpoints.
Which ASP pages were actually in use? We had to find a way to limit our application migration efforts to only those pages which were used by the application. A colleague at the time introduced me to what must be one of the best-kept secrets in the Windows developer world: Microsoft Log Parser.
As head of technical operations at Etsy, whose web traffic is pretty substantial, Jon focused on resilience in software systems: what it is, and how to achieve it.
In essence, he argued for a distinction between micro-architecture (the design of the individual [sub]system) and macro architecture (the design of interacting systems).
Over the past seven or eight years I have developed a list of five key interview questions for recruiting staff to software development teams. These five questions have come to stand out as being highly indicative of the candidate’s aptitude for approaching software in [what is now called] a “DevOps” manner, namely, seeing software as the running, evolving system in the Production environment.
Matthew Skelton 