I discovered strace somewhere between my first part time web development part time job in 2005 and my first full time “software engineering” job in 2008, and it seemed like a superpower giving me x-ray vision into running infrastructure. When a process was stuck, or existing after a cryptic error message, instead of grepping around I could get a pretty good timeline of what the process was up to. It has some fatal flaws, the ptrace based technology can cause performance issues so it’s mostly not suited to running in production (unless you were one of my personal heros: the old mysql@facebook team which liked to live dangerously and often used ptrace based debuggers to obtain life profiling data).