Flutterby™! : On debugging and systems code

USENIX.org November 2013: The Night Watch - James Mickens (PDF):

... As a systems hacker, you must be prepared to do savage things, unspeakable things, to kill runaway threads with your bare hands, to write directly to network ports using telnet and an old copy of an RFC that you found in the Vatican. When you debug systems code, there are no high-level debates about font choices and the best kind of turquoise, because this is the Old Testament, an angry and monochromatic world, and it doesn’t matter whether your Arial is Bold or Condensed when people are covered in boils and pestilence and Egyptian pharaoh oppression. HCI people discover bugs by receiving a concerned email from their therapist. Systems people discover bugs by waking up and discovering that their first-born children are missing and “ETIMEDOUT ” has been written in blood on the wall.