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What Can System Administrators Learn from Programmers?

Although we often hear about program bugs and techniques to get rid of them, we seldom see a similar focus in the field of system administration. This is unfortunate, because increasingly the reliability of an IT system depends as much on the software comprising the system as on the support infrastructure hosting it.

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Efficient Human Multitasking

I sometimes hear colleagues complaining that they can't get anything done, because they have too many tasks in their head. I've found that in order to increase the efficiency of my work I need a moderately large selection of pending tasks. This allows me to match the type of work I can do at a given moment with a task in the most optimal way.

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Boot Lock

I first admired this ingenious method of locking a car in Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean series. A few days ago I saw it in real life.

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Quality, Democracy, and Code

Edwin Fine recently posted on amazon.com a review of my book Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective. In the review he complained about the quality of proofreading and copy editing. (The errors he noted are now listed in the book's errata.) His comments sparked off a delightful discussion on the reasons behind the falling quality levels of various products, the philosophical importance of this phenomenon, and its effect on coding standards.

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Choosing a Programming Language

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do.

— Dennis M. Ritchie

Computer languages fascinate me. Like a living person, each one has its own history, personality, interests, and quirks. Once you've learned one, you can use it again after years of neglect, and it's like reconnecting with an old friend: you can continue discussions from the point they were broken off years before. For a task I recently faced I adopted a language I hadn't used for 15 years, and felt enlightened.

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