Hi all,

GoLUG meeting discussing the costs and benefits of transparent systems on 3/6:

====================================================================== What: Online presentation: System Transparency, Costs and Benefits Who: Steve Litt When: Wednesday 3/6/2024 at 7PM Eastern Standard Time Where: Jitsi online presentation, https://meet.jit.si/golug [1] ======================================================================

FEATURING: * Quick demo of my new email pager system * Definition of System Transparency: - Many accessible test points - Internal workings are partially to completely visible - Opposite of black box * Two examples from my new email pager system: - Fetchmail enhanced with a shellscript - Procmail enhanced with a Python program * Costs and Benefits: - Benefits - Costs - Making the choice * Contrived test points

System transparency yields huge debugging benefits, but paradoxically can also add to complexity. Whether you're creating a new system or using a pre-made system for new or unusual purposes, you need to make your system or subsystem at least transparent enough that you can sanely debug it, in order to save yourself hours or days of frustrating and needless debugging. This is true of hardware and software, although this presentation will showcase software. I hope to see you there.

SteveT

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Online via Jitsi: https://meet.jit.si/golug

Mobile app: https://jitsi.org/downloads/

Desktop app: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases