“Working at or close to 100% utilization will slow to a crawl everything that depends on you.”
Applying the Universal Scalability Law to organisations | the morning paper https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/04/29/applying-the-universal-scalability-law-to-organisations/
Many information sources are autogenerated via OOB triggers & workflows. This is great!
Ensure automatically generated views have both a version & deep link to the source that generated them and if possible, the specific execution. Backpointers are everybody’s learning friend.
Use a text expander (I use @AlfredApp) with both local tz and UTC date/times to reduce friction populating those fields. This is also handy during incident management for timeline management.
🧵 Asynchronous communication tips I’ve found helpful…
Add a `LastUpdated` column/parenthetical to spreadsheet rows and document transient-content. Yes, many systems have audit logs. No, people will typically not bisect the history to find the one change of interest.
🧵 How to Make Automated Systems Team Players
- Christoffersen & Woods (2001)
“We seem to be locked into a mindset of thinking that technology and people are independent components – either this electronic box failed or that human box failed.”
Adding a OOB script or an automatically triggered behavior is like adding a team member. Every commit to those sources creates an entirely new team with radically new behavior. From “quick refactor” to “heap OOM OMG”. Every non-hermetically build does the same.
Automatic scripts should share their identity (commit), what data they’re using to evaluate, *why* certain actions were performed, what they expected to see, how long they expected that to take, etc. Please be a communicative teammate.
In the worst case, when things escalate, automated tooling/side effects create increased coordination and cognitive load. The understandable response is either to ignore them or turn them off.
Making automated agents that are tempo & situationally aware is hard.
Human agents are typically responsible for outcomes which means automated agents should be in a supporting role. And unpredictable things happen, can we all adapt together? Bimodal human/machine potentially loses out on delegation opportunities. Are they flexible?
“[T]hey find that the only reason many of these joint systems perform adequately at all is because of the resourcefulness and adaptability that the human agents display in the face of uncommunicative and uncooperative machine agents.”
“We’ve learned there’s enormous opportunity just in quantifying software engineers’ day-to-day experience writing software, and how it’s impacting the business.”
Thread by @rmurphey on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1557045725447569411.html
💯 “What we have observed is that across every activity across every industry vertical, high performers have figured out how to vastly reduce the cost of coordination.“
On Coordination Costs: Moving A Couch, And Painting A Room - IT Revolution https://itrevolution.com/on-coordination-costs-moving-a-couch-and-painting-a-room/
“Especially if they’re used to IT Services organizations that do exactly (and only) what’s been spec’d by business stakeholders, they interpret this as unwillingness: won’t rather than can’t.”
https://www.mironov.com/pri-politics/
“We have a different trinity of concerns: design, engineering, and product management. Here I’m sharing how each function fits into the puzzle.”
How engineering, design, and product form the ‘software trinity’ | LeadDev https://leaddev.com/cross-functional-collaboration/how-engineering-design-and-product-form-software-trinity
“I think that all of that, again intersectionally, is important to people who are aspiring to do those sorts of roles, executive leadership within tech.”
Being an Under-represented Voice in the CTO Chair https://suzansfieldnotes.substack.com/p/being-an-under-represented-voice
“This post shows you how concurrency and transactions per second work within the Lambda lifecycle. It also covers ways to measure, control, and optimize them.” https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/understanding-aws-lambda-scaling-and-throughput/
“[A]n inclusive environment, one that attempts to correct for systematic bias and ensure that a broader range of humanity can be successful can be so impactful for improved DEI outcomes.” https://cate.blog/2022/07/18/from-visibility-to-representation-rethinking-dei/
“Ironically, toil eats up the time needed to do the engineering work that will prevent future toil.” https://leaddev.com/productivity-eng-velocity/what-toil-and-why-it-damaging-your-engineering-org
“People in management roles need to see the system and work on system, but receive little to no training in system seeing/thinking/acting.”
https://www.estherderby.com/11-things-abt-managers/
“Later that week it was all working. But along the way I yelled at the computer more than I’d have expected.”
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/05/14/Golang-Generics
“The paper describes a very simple and intuitive property of a system — monotonicity — that determines whether coordination is needed or not. Let’s see what that means.” https://blog.techlanika.com/avoiding-coordination-cost-three-patterns-for-building-efficient-distributed-systems-b8aff9314e88
“This paper presents our experience operating DynamoDB at a massive scale and how the architecture continues to evolve to meet the ever-increasing demands of customer workloads.”
“Remember, this is a cultural change, and cultural changes that don’t involve changes to what is valued when it comes to recognition and rewards are destined to failure.” https://skamille.medium.com/the-product-culture-shift-441c31a3fdf1
“Research in high reliability teams has recognized that individual competence in clinical skills is not enough; team coordination, communication, and cooperation skills are essential to effective and safe performance.” https://www.rmf.harvard.edu/clinician-resources/article/2014/crico-operating-room-team-training-collaborative-closed-loop-communication
You’ve probably already read it and in case not, the importance of customer empathy is a strong theme in https://www.amazon.com/dp/0672326140/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_VGTPKSZCDT7BPCZ764S5
“When people know what they are collectively trying to achieve they can determine the how themselves (or at least course correct the how because they know what success is supposed to be).” https://wioota.substack.com/p/walters-lever-of-improvement
‘Safety I can be considered an approach where we try to ensure that “as few things as possible go wrong”, whilst the Safety II perspective focuses on ensuring “as many things as possible go well”.’ https://psychsafety.co.uk/psychological-safety-73-safety-i-safety-ii/
“In this period, apart from database or application design, the technical success of a growing product benefited significantly from adopting a few characteristics. In this article, I’ll capture a few to highlight what helped us.” https://rakyll.medium.com/how-to-peacefully-grow-your-service-c40c25fe097f
“While I’m writing this post as a counterpoint to many conversations I’ve seen on social media about the changing nature of engineering management, all of these conversations also have made me feel genuinely hopeful.” https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/an-engineering-managers-bill-of-rights-and-responsibilities/
Some sources of context that I try to include in log output, visualizations, etc.
1. Source link. Bonus points: deep commit URL
2. When artifact was refreshed (UTC)
3. If CLI: command line used to create behavior/output/visualization
4. Inline/URL to “How can I use this” docs
“Ideas don’t exist in a vacuum. The context surrounding those ideas plays a key role in their adoption. For ideas to take off, developers, customers, and business leaders need to be able to embrace them.” https://twitter.com/kstewart/status/1565066795991834624
