I am following the 37signals blog ever since I kinda randomly stumbled upon their Getting Real book. If you never heard about them, definitely check out the book, is a very common sense approach to managing product development in the age of Internets. On this post http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1798-jasons-talk-at-big-omaha-2009 I was really touched by one remark: Inspiration is perishable. The ideas you have can linger in your head for a long time, but the inspiration for it fades quickly. So don’t postpone it, by the time you get to it you’ll only deliver a pale image of the original idea. Do it when you’re pumped up and thrilled by it.

I reckon I’m a procrastinator deLuxe, but I have to agree. I know the difference between working at 2 am. and not feeling a bit tired when I’m excited about my work on one hand, and the damp feeling of exhaustion that drags you to watch some stupid TV show at 6 pm because I’m bored with the current project on the other hand.

I got tagged by Adam Machanic. Although my blog looks like a DBA blog, I am a pure breed developer, so here is what I know now:

You can’t fix what you can’t measure

Successful projects dedicate quite a large amount of resources to instrumentation, profiling and monitoring. Anywhere between 5 and 10% of the used resources should be an acceptable margin to run code that generates logs, reports performance counters, monitors responsiveness, aggregates and consolidates run time data. I cannot stress the importance of properly instrumenting your code to support this. It has been said before that any optimization or troubleshooting should start from measurements, not from guesswork. Your duty is to put those measurements in place, expose information your users can rely on in order to make informed decisions. Don’t cut corners and eat your dog food: use the instrumentation you added to troubleshoot problems, don’t fire up a debugger and start stepping through the sources. If you cannot figure out the cause of a problem from the tracing and logs, your customers won’t be able to do it either. Nor will you be able to troubleshoot on site at a customer deployment.

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I will attend tomorrow, December 4, the Data Mining and Business Intelligence for Enterprises event in Bucharest thanks to an invitation from my friend the SQL Server MVP Cristian Lefter. Now I know that most readers of this blog will not be in Romania 🙂 but I thought to post this case you happen to be there and want to have a Service Broker chat or just want to meet me and say Hi!