Thoughts on systems safety, software operations, and sociotechnical systems.
After leaving my CTO role at Etsy this past May, I took the summer off to spend time with my family, enjoy New York summertime, and give my mind time to refresh and recharge. I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do next; the last time I took a new job was […]
Earlier this year, I was asked to contribute to an article in IEEE Software, entitled “Technical Debt: Challenges and Perspectives.” I can’t post the entire article here, but I can post the accepted text of my part of the article here. [well] Misusing the Metaphor John Allspaw All technical disciplines (not just software development) require […]
Read more Invited article in IEEE Software – Technical Debt: Challenges and Perspectives
Over the years, a number of people have asked about the details surrounding Etsy’s architecture review process. In this post, I’d like to focus on the architecture review working group’s role in facilitating dialogue about technology decision-making. Part of this is really just about working groups in general (pros, cons, formats, etc.) and another part […]
Read more Multiple Perspectives On Technical Problems and Solutions
I’m reading a book that was suggested to me by the Director of the Office of Learning in the US Forest Service as “required reading” for any modern organization that intends to learn – Dialogue: The Art Of Thinking Together As a teaser, William Isaacs makes a very good case for considering discussion to be seen as […]
Read more Book Suggestion: “Dialogue: The Art Of Thinking Together”
The New Stack has an interview with me on various topics here. I think the following part of the interview gets at what I think is an under-investigated bit of language and meaning: [well] TNS: At the same time, I imagine that you’ve abstracted a lot of the supporting infrastructure away from the engineer. They don’t […]
I’m going to post the contents of a gist I wrote (2 years ago?!), because Theo is right, some gists are better as posts. The context for this was a debate on Twitter (which, as always, is about as elegant and pleasing to read as a turtle trying to breakdance). Summing up contextual influence on systems architecture […]
I just spent the last week in Lisbon, Portugal at the Resilience Engineering Symposium. Zoran Perkov and I were invited to speak on the topic of software operations and resilience in the financial trading and Internet services worlds, to an audience of practitioners and researchers from all around the globe, in a myriad of industries. […]
Read more Reflections on the 6th Resilience Engineering Symposium
From Perspectives On Cognitive Task Analysis: Historical Origins and Modern Communities of Practice (emphasis mine) The Aretha Franklin Principle Do not devalue the human to justify the machine. Do not criticize the machine to rationalize the human. Advocate the human—machine system to amplify both. The Sacagawea Principle Human-centered computational tools need to support active organization of […]
I’d like to open up a dialogue with companies who are selling X-As-A-Service products that are focused on assisting operations and development teams in tracking the health and performance of their software systems. [well]Note: It’s likely my suggestions below are understood and embraced by many companies already. I know a number of them who are […]
Read more An Open Letter To Monitoring/Metrics/Alerting Companies
This is a photo of the backside of the T-shirt for the operations engineering team at Etsy: This diagram might not come as a surprise to those who know that I come from a mechanical engineering background. But I also wanted to have this on the T-shirt as a reminder (maybe just to myself, but […]