7th
The reason software is so bad is that it’s so easy to make
New Relic announced that it raised some money today. It looks like a pretty cool product. Assuming it works as advertised, you drop their plugin into your rails app, then visit their web app to browse and analyze its performance.
Isn’t this a problem that every programmer in every language runs into? Tools like gprof and DTrace perform similar functions, but in a MUCH more general set of applications.
Despite not really being “new technology”, New Relic stands apart in that it seems to generate useful data without requiring the developer to really know what they should be looking for (e.g. you don’t have to tell it what you want monitored, it just figures that out for you). Makes you wonder whether you can ever expect an application to scale when it’s built by someone that doesn’t know how it will scale.
A friend of mine always used to say “The reason software is so bad is that it’s so easy to make!” And over time it seems that software really does only get easier to make. But this doesn’t tell the whole picture.
This whole “software gets easier to make” progression relies upon a small cadre of software engineers who actually make software easier to make. While you have the mass of programmers growing and applying decreasing levels of sophistication to their application authoring techniques (e.g. assembly language -> C -> J2EE -> Ruby on Rails), you have the small cadre of architects applying increasing levels of knowledge about what has worked at what hasn’t (e.g. procedures -> libraries -> classes -> patterns -> frameworks — or some such progression WLOG).
So I can accept the “dumbing down” of software, because it is directly enabled by the “smartening up” of the underlying technologies on top of which most software is built.
That being said… Hey DTrace team. You can’t just be sitting on your haunches? Where’s your DTrace web service that let’s you “one-click” monitor any application?
