What does a good exception message look like?

Today I have to bring up a great article that is over a year old. They topic is what exception messages really should look like. As bonus I would like to increase the scope of the discussion to also include log messages and test failures.

Is logging raw HTTP requests ok?

When you are working on services that need to scale to millions of users you typically come to the conclusion that you will never be able to start a debugger on one of your live services. Instead you need instrumentation (also known as logging, tracing or diagnostics) to make sure you can figure out what went wrong. What I see happening a lot is that developers start logging the raw HTTP request to capture all data. And there are several problems with this approach...

Monitoring is Testing

So a while back I was approached by DZone for some feedback on software quality. After ranting for an hour I was asked if I would mind writing an article on the topic. So I did and it got published earlier this week.

Maturity model for service monitoring

Over the years I've encountered organizations and individuals that all have different levels of service monitoring maturity. I figured it was time to talk a little about these. And by monitoring I mean the things you look at to understand the health of a service. And I'm especially considering how good vs bad health is quickly determined.

What to do with a caught exception

Some people like exceptions and some don't. Some people like them for exceptional things. Regardless of what type you are there is also a debate about what you do with that exception once you catch it.

A kingdom for a developer

So this happened a few years ago in the days between Christmas and New Year. I was using the slow days after Christmas to get some work done in the office when suddenly a guy from the operations team came running down the hallways shouting "a developer, a developer, a kingdom for a developer"!

The Good Diagnostics Paradox

If you want your system to have good diagnostics (aka logging) I find there is a kind of catch-22 in achieving it. And that is regardless of if we are thinking about diagnostics in order to understand why things went wrong or if it is to do business analysis. And rather than calling it catch-22 I'll call it a paradox. Because it sounds cooler...