what to learn

[Michael Butash]

Learn some networking too.  Please.

Far too many devs and sysadmins both stick their head in the dirt, 
treating networking as plumbing that will never complain and always take 
their poop.  Trusting magical api's to send and return data to some 
nebulous entity over the network is inviting disaster if you don't 
understand the underlying infrastructure.  It's the only way to take 
your code or systems to the next level, as every app you make is going 
to be network enabled these days.

Sadly developers are often taught to "trust" api's vs. understanding 
networking (ahem, microsofties), much to their eventual detriment.  It's 
about performance, redundancy, scalability when you're talking network 
apps.  So many developers I've worked with over the past 15 years are 
entirely clueless when it comes to networks (and security) that it 
hampers ultimately their ability to make "good" apps.  Often leaving me 
to kludge some kind of network solution around them when they realize 
their app needs to be redundant and scale, ultimately creating 
compromises in the network because of it.

If you can't understand what a tcp or udp socket is, how they work, and 
how much bandwidth you project to consume on the network, you're missing 
something.

-mb


On 08/26/2013 08:34 AM, George Toft wrote:
> What interests you?  I know many sysadmins that don't develop code; many
> developers that can't spell Linux (OK, they can, but they also think 777
> permissions fix everything, even access to data files).  I've even met
> SA's that couldn't script, but that limits their usefulness and shows a
> lack of motivation and curiosity - both highly desirable traits in the
> workplace.