Outside of software, resilience engineering is an established field using this definition and disambiguating the others. Some info on the origins going back to the 70s http://erikhollnagel.com/ideas/resilience-engineering.html. It’s only the last 5-10 years that people in software have been getting involved
We haven’t acknowledged that trying to ‘find causes’ at all is misleading!
Causes are something we create and construct afterwards. They aren’t a primitive that make up incidents. They don’t fundamentally exist to be found.
Causal explanations limit what we find and learn and the irony is that root cause analysis is built on an idea that incidents can be fully comprehended—they can’t!
Instead think about the conditions that allowed an incident to occur. Separate out everything you think looks like a cause and explore each of them.
Talk about the properties and attributes that were present. There are so many aspects to incidents that aren’t even causes at all, and they don’t follow a linear chain of this-led-to-that.
People are presented with RCA and 5 whys as really getting to the bottom of what matters, but the reality is this approach is a linear simplification. We need to kick it up a notch and practice more holistic investigations of incidents.
Stop getting at why people didn’t do what they thought they should have done, and start getting to the point of what actually happened and how those actions seemed reasonable at the time.
Spring is probably the only thing. All the rest of the stuff on the tech blog and Netflix OSS is heavily AWS centric, even the container platform Titus.
Spring Cloud includes a lot of the Netflix OSS stuff though like Zuul and Archaius.
Aside from the not-Uber aspect, istio and envoy have driven a lot of excitement around lyft from a tech perspective. I wonder how much that factors in here or if I'm overestimating the hype.
I have an adjustable desk. It's really nice to be able to move around throughout the day, but for any thoughtful task that requires some amount focus, I have to sit. I'd like to read further collectively inconclusive research about that.
I have the exact same issue. I recently moved to an adjustable desk, and writing emails is fine standing up. It's when I need to have a 2-3 hour coding session that I must sit down or I can't focus. I am wondering if this is learned behavior or if sitting down fosters creativity in some way. I'd love to see some science on it too.
It took me 6 months to make the switch. My standing desk has two computers, 2 keyboards, and 3 screens, soon to be more. I have both systems set up for working on different parts of the same project. I work for an hour on one, walk to the other, do some different work.
Switching to this kind of setup was both physical and mental. It was taxing assuming the right posture after years of sitting. My back isn't quite right, but it's a lot better now. Mentally speaking, sometimes I need to sit - I just can't do a certain thing standing up or I'm mentally exhausted and it starts manifesting physically. I actually sit on the floor now, it's uncomfortable and encourages me to stand after a while.
So, the net result is, I've incorporated both mental and physical movement into my work and life.
Adjustable desk owner here as well - while it's great and I wouldn't want to miss it [1], I also have a bar stool with a backrest, so I can easily transition between standing and sitting in a second. I also often find sitting conducive to thinking, but then again sometimes I feel most focused when walking around the room.
It's hard to put my finger on what it depends on exactly, but it seems to me that often when I have no idea how to approach a problem, I like to sit or lie down, roll it around in my mind, maybe look at the code/the application and let possible solutions come to me. When I already have a basic idea of what direction to go in, I like to walk around in front of my desk while I work out the details (= talk them over with myself) and then type/write standing.
It almost seems as if the natural action for a physical destination (not standing around like an idiot until I know where I want to go, then starting to walk and finding my way there as soon as I do) helps with the corresponding thought processes involved in reaching a purely mental destination.
Regarding the physical aspect - over the last years of transitioning to and experimenting with a standing a desk I have had phases where I spent hours standing, phases where I went back to sitting most of the time and phases where I had a balance between the two. My personal experience seems to match the anecdotal evidence I've encountered as well as what seems to be the scientific consensus (oiling of joints and lymphatic circulation both rely on movement, among other things), which is that the human body simply isn't designed for spending long periods of time in a single static position.
Spending hours standing tends to hurt my feet and knees, spending hours sitting makes my back unhappy. Constantly switching between the two and walking around the room in between makes long sessions of working on a computer much less taxing on the body by far and it makes perfect sense to me that the accumulative effect of this over the course of years and decades will make a difference to my quality of life down the line (in addition to the immediate effects I'm experiencing often after only a single day of doing one or the other).
Another thing I've noticed - giving myself the option to easily switch positions, forcing myself to do it for a while with a timer and paying attention to how it feels, lead to me being aware of becoming restless in a single position after a while and noticing the beginning discomfort in parts of the body, which I only used to notice when they were already hurting after hours standing or sitting.
I don't use a timer anymore, by now I just listen to my body telling me when it's time to move my arse and it all syncs up nicely with the different mental states I move between during work.
On a side note/quick rant - how stuck are we in our heads and screens, how detached are we from our bodies and how ignorant of the fact that in evolutionary terms we were moving around all the time until like a second ago, that we need a study to figure out that hey, maybe sitting on our collective arses 90% of the time might not be great for us and are we really sure that's a problem, maybe we need more studies. End of rant.
TL;DR - get an adjustable desk and a comfortable bar stool, don't stand still, pay attention to how you're feeling - both your body and your mind will thank you.
[1] IKEA has this cheap manually adjustable option if one doesn't want to spend the money on an electrical desk, plus only having mechanical parts means it's less likely to break/easier to fix if it does:
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S29084966/
P.S. The rant wasn't directed at you/delias_, I was just randomly shouting into the ether. Kind of like an old crazy man in the subway.
P.P.S. General note on working standing - occasionally, that is every few minutes or whenever I feel like it, I will move around from leg to leg, get up on my toes, move my knees around, etc. That feels much better than planting my heels on the floor and not moving for an hour.
naive tip: give your app that is relying on github a SKIPGIT environment variable to ignore the bits around git operations, and just make local changes as an interim hack.
Having worked at an MMO dev, I think this talk's praises and criticisms are all super on point. The social stereotypes of tech are I think even more pronounced in the games industry, and it would be super if everyone were this conscientious and their companies empowered all employees to have a voice about this kind of thing.
The pitfalls can so easily slip through into emerging social media forms. Making aware the lessons learned from the pioneering days of social videogames is definitely not an easy thing to do simply due to the elitism and proprietary nature prevalent in the games industry.
>Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based services and software offered by companies such as Google and Amazon—an emphasis that was known, under Dickerson, as “code as craft”
So many times people fail to look at problems in terms of trade-offs instead of right/wrong or fashionable/faus pax
Running your own infra vs public cloud has so many considerations beyond a simple price tag. Massive scale companies on AWS have hadoop clusters just to work out their goddamn bill. But there are considerations you have to make about the number of people to maintain something and how that affects your org on just a cultural/sustainability level, what the velocity of SaaS allows you, etc.
Running your own infra doesn't have to be full of cruft. And maybe the rolling-your-own approach to certain things is paradigmatic to the way your business works, maybe it isn't. You have to figure out the trade-offs.
Newer, fashionable tech is often decorated with tag lines of "faster, cheaper, better". That's actually not what I care about. Instead, sell me on "recoverable", "debuggable", and "sustainable".
