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....
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(this is also posted on O’Reilly’s Radar blog. Much thanks to Daniel Schauenberg, Morgan Evans, and Steven Shorrock for feedback on this) Before I begin this post, let me say that this is intended to be a critique of the Five Whys method, not a criticism of the people who are in favor of using...
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One of the reasons I’ve continued to be more and more interested in Human Factors and Safety Science is that I found myself without many answers to the questions I have had in my career. Questions surrounding how organizations work, how people think and work with computers, how decisions get made under uncertainty, and how...
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Below is a piece written by Edward Wenk, Jr., which originally appeared in PRlSM, the magazine for the American Society for Engineering Education (Publication Volume 6. No. 4. December 1996.) While I think that there’s much more than what Wenk points to as ‘social science’ – I agree wholeheartedly with his ideas. I might even say...
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One of the things that I hoped to get across in my post about perspectives on mature engineering was the subtle idea that engineering’s relationship to science is not straightforward. My first caveat is that I am not a language expert, but I do respect it as a potential deadly weapon. I do hope that...
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I’m a firm believer in restating values, goals, and perspectives at the beginning of every group debriefing (e.g. “postmortem meetings”) in order to bring new folks up to speed on how we view the process and what the purpose of the debriefing is. When I came upon a similar baselining dialogue from another domain, I...
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A Time to Remember I want you to think back to a time when you found yourself in an emergency situation at work. Maybe it was diagnosing and trying to recover from a site outage. Maybe it was when you were confronting the uncertain possibility of critical data loss. Maybe it was when you and...
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In between reading copious amounts of indignation surrounding whatever is suboptimal about healthcare.gov, you may or may not have noticed the SEC statement regarding the Knight Capital accident that took place in 2012. This Release No. 70694 is a document that contains many details about the accident, and you can read what looks like on the surface...
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(This was originally posted on Code As Craft, Etsy’s engineering blog. I’m re-posting it here because it still resonates strongly as I prepare to teach a ‘postmortem facilitator’s course internally at Etsy.) Last week, Owen Thomas wrote a flattering article over at Business Insider on how we handle errors and mistakes at Etsy. I thought...
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In the past month or two, I’ve spoken on the topic of alert design. There’s a video of my giving the talk (at Monitorama, as well), but I thought I’d try to post on the topic and material as well. The topic of alerts and “alert design” as seen as a deliberate and purposeful thing...
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