My first anniversary of working with Squixa passed recently and I began to reflect on just how much working with an entirely unfamiliar technology stack has been different from working with the Microsoft platform, and how it has been different when compared to my initial expectations.

In the early weeks into the new job I began writing down the names of tools and technologies that I was learning each day but it quickly reached more than 50 long and I stopped updating it. Looking back at that list now, it has become a list of things I use every day, most have formed muscle memories, many I have read the source code for, and a number I have submitted patches to for bug-fixes or enhancements.

On the Microsoft platform I was a regular user and contributor to open-source projects on CodePlex and GitHub and more often than not I trusted .NET Reflector over documentation to better understand how some component should work. Over in *nix land though, source code is unavoidable, sadly sometimes as an alternative to documentation, but more often simply as the preferred distribution method. I’ve certainly read a lot more source code each week than I have previously, and in a wider variety of languages, and although it is sometimes tedious it has also taught me a lot. It’s not just developers that need a compiler installed but any user looking outside what their favourite *nix-flavour packages for them.

I was never particularly bothered by the lack of system package manager on Windows even though I’d heard its absence was oft-maligned by *nix folk. Having used a package manager in anger now, I can both appreciate just how much effort it saves when trying to automate machine provisioning but also found that there are many challenges with version pinning and when one’s chosen distribution does not stay current with new software releases. I’m sure the new Windows 10 PackageManagement (formerly OneGet) will be an awesome step forward for Microsoft in this space.

I wrote a lot of PowerShell before I changed jobs and I revelled in the language’s ability to work with objects and APIs. The typical shell in *nix lacks this but I’ve rarely had to deal with objects or APIs in my new job. Here Everything is a file and normally a plain-text file at that and so languages focused on text manipulation instead are ample. Configuration management systems end up spending most of their time overwriting files generated from templates instead of trying to interact with an API in some idempotent manner. Personally though, dealing with pattern matching and character- or field-offsets still feels too brittle and harder to re-comprehend later.

There are some popular applications in Linux doing some really awesome tricks. One favourite example is the nginx web server which can upgrade its binary, launch a new version of itself, hand-over existing connections and listening sockets and never drop a packet. It’s not that things like this are not achievable on the Windows platform, it’s just that for some unknown reason, nobody is doing it. While Microsoft is still fighting hard against a “just restart it” culture to avoid unnecessary down-time, Torvalds recently merged live kernel patching in Linux.

Ultimately though all the problems are the same across both platforms. You need to make sure you understand exactly what each application needs access to so you can constrain it to the least possible privileges – but not everyone does. You hit resource limits on process counts, file handles, network connections, etc but at different thresholds. You’re susceptible to the same failure conditions but they often have different failure modes, and rarely the one you would have preferred.

For every difference, there are double the similarities. The platforms have different driving principles guiding which solution to prefer for a given problem, but neither is necessarily better, simply idiomatic. At this point I’m expecting that I’ll continue to use whichever platform my current project requires without any favouritism and hopefully be switching back and forth enough to stay abreast of the latest developments on each.