1/9/08

Kids - Please Learn How to Program

There is nothing more frustrating in my job than not being able to help with hard core technical issues that arise. This morning, we had an issue with a table in our database. It cost us about three hours of uptime.

My role in getting this fixed? Firing off emails and texts to our lead developer and host saying stuff like "it's still timing out." Why? Because I didn't know how to go in and fix it myself.

It was an incredibly frustrating and helpless feeling.

Anyway, my personal motto is "don't be a victim." So, I'm checking out some programming classes at the local community college.

3 comments:

  1. With all due respect, it takes a lot more than just taking a few community classes to become a hardcore developer. There are usually many intricate moving parts in making the whole site work and it isn't easy to track down where the problem is unless you know all layers of the architecture and many times, the failure is not even in the DB. It could be the web server that failed, or the app server, or a bug in the code, or network configuration, or hard disk failure, or memory chip failure, or OS patch upgrade, or the list goes on... Sometimes having a little knowledge is more dangerous than not knowing at all, so use it with caution.

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  2. Points taken. I'm under no illusions that taking a few classes is going to make me a programmer. I have too much respect for the profession to think it's that easy. However, you have to start somewhere...

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  3. Good for you for taking the initiative to take classes on it; good luck on that!

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