Recently we’ve talked to a lot of junior and graduate software engineering candidates. We had a crop of awesome interns over the summer (one of whom we hired). We’ve also hired some excellent junior software engineers to round out the team over the last twelve months. We do screening calls with almost all of the candidates and we’ve begun to notice a pattern. Almost every candidate asks us, in some form or fashion, to define what we consider “junior”.

I’ve never forgotten my friend Luke Kanies telling me one of his golden rules for travel: “never eat food in a centre for mass transit”. Over the years I’ve gathered a few more, some cribbed from friends (Hi Jeff! Hi Gary!) and others the result of hard-learned experience. Here’s twenty of my tips in no particular order: Always be polite to airline and airport staff. Always. No matter how shite things are going: manners matter.

Over the course of the series I’ve talked about monitoring effectiveness, monitoring environments, metrics, the tools people use to monitor and the demographics of the survey. In this last post I am providing the anonymized source data that I based my analysis on. It’s in CSV form and comes directly from Survey Monkey. The only data I have removed is the IP address of the respondents to make it anonymous.

In the last posts I talked about monitoring environments, metrics, the tools people used in monitoring and the demographics of the survey. In this post I am going to look at the questions around the effectiveness of monitoring, how people handle alerting and the use of configuration management software. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the survey got 1,116 responses of which 884 were complete and my analysis only includes complete responses.

In the last posts I talked about the tools people used in monitoring, the demographics, and what environments people monitor. In this post I am going to look at the questions around collecting metrics and what those metrics are used for by respondents. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the survey got 1,116 responses of which 884 were complete. This post will cover the questions: 7. Do you collect metrics on your infrastructure and applications?