When I left the world of Geology I moved to application development and Oracle database administration. Both of which are wrought with features, bugs, rewards, and grief. Often when the hours got long and my curses were directed at a screen, my wife would ask me what was the matter. Frustrated I would utter something unintelligible and she would just ask me, “have you checked your logs?”

.

So many problems, hours, days, dollars, resources would have been saved if we’d only checked our logs. These are my simple steps for tackling any technical problem:

1. Have you checked your logs?
2. Really? I don’t believe you. Check them again
3. Seriously
4. That was yesterday’s log, Check today’s
5. That’s it
6. Move to the next problem
7. Repeat.

Checking logs and addressing issues is the easy part. It gets harder when programs are not instrumented properly. If you don’t know how long something takes and where time is being spent you are doing it wrong. Log everything or at least allow a program to enable actions to be logged and you will be all set.

In the meantime, keep checking your logs.