These days, I’m called a “software developer”. While I have some background doing test-driven development in C++ and OO-Perl, this is the first time I’ve carried the “developer” job description exclusively.

When folks ask, I always say that I’m a “Recovering Sysadmin”, a quip I got from Irving Popovetsky at Chef.

Monitoring is the Same as Testing.

There is some benefit to having a sysadmin background. One thing I’ve noticed is that developers love to test during development, but not once the code is released. With my team, I have been making the case that monitoring is the same as testing. If a test is important enough for TDD, then that same test should be run continuously in the production environment.

Benji Weber takes the idea to its logical conclusion by proposing Monitoring Driven Development

Sounds like a good idea to me.