The Criticality of Sustaining the Deployment Pipeline During COVID-19 Much thanks to the members of the Learning From Incidents community who helped review and contribute to drafts of this post! The world is in crisis but I feel like the approach that tech companies around the world are taking to immediately add significant bureaucracy to […]
I had to take up the challenge of speaking about Resilience Engineering at an Ignite talk that I gave at the always excellent NYC DevOpsDays. Here’s the abstract for this 5 minute talk: Of course the answer to the question in the title is “no” because this twenty-year old multidisciplinary field is as broad and […]
Dr. David Woods is writing diary entries as the coronavirus pandemic unfolds…
Last year at the Re-Deploy conference, my colleague Dr. Richard Cook gave one of the most cogent and clear talks on descriptions of resilience and resilience engineering that I’ve yet to come across. I’m embedding the video below, but I’m also including an interactive transcript for those who prefer reading rather than watching and listening. […]
A question today on Twitter regarding the distinction between “how” questions and “why?” questions reminded me of another reflection on this topic, in Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While You’re Doing It. Howard Becker (University of Chicago) in 1998 wrote on page 58: Ask “How?” Not “Why?” Everyone knows this […]
1) Incident reviews serve multiple purposes. Some of these purposes are overt and explicit but many are not. Some of these purposes cut across others in unproductive ways. Competing agendas reveal the power dynamics present in the organization. A manager who complains that too few action items were produced has revealed his/her real interest: the […]
A few weeks ago I tweeted this thread which references sacrifice decisions and contrasts some facets of the Knight Capital (2012) case and the NYSE trading halt (2015) case: On Aug 1, 2012, a company named Knight Capital experienced a business-destroying incident. Much has been written about it, but that’s not the topic of this thread. […]
Dr. Richard Cook and I were honored to contribute to a chapter in the new book Seeking SRE edited by the lovely David Blank-Edelman. Consider it a signpost along the way as we learn more about how engineers actually do their work in real-world scenarios (rather than abstract or generalized descriptions of how we like to […]