allspaw

Availability: Nuance As A Service

January 3, 2013

Something that has struck me funny recently surrounds the traditional notion of availability of web applications. With respect to its relationship to revenue, to infrastructure and application behavior, and fault protection and tolerance, I’m thinking it may be time to get a broader upgrade adjustment to the industry’s perception on the topic. These nuances in the [...]

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On Being A Senior Engineer

October 25, 2012

I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer. But while there are a good deal of books in the management field about “expert” roles and responsibilities of non-technical individual contributors, I don’t see too many modern books or posts that might shed light [...]

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A Mature Role for Automation: Part I

September 21, 2012

I’ve been percolating on this post for a long time. Thanks very much to Mark Burgess for reviewing early drafts of it. One of the ideas that permeates our field of web operations is that we can’t have enough automation. You’ll see experience with “building automation” on almost every job description, and many post-mortem transcriptions [...]

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Fundamental: Stress-Strain Curves In Web Engineering

September 10, 2012

I make it no secret that my background is in mechanical engineering. I still miss those days of explicit and dynamic finite element analysis, when I worked for the VNTSC, working on vehicle crashworthiness studies for the NHTSA. What was there not to like? Things like cars and airbags and seatbelts and dummies and that [...]

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Human Factors and Web Engineering’s Intersection

August 7, 2012

Given my recent (and apparently insatiable appetite) for studying the contexts, interface(s), and success and failure modes  between man and machine, it’s not a surprise that I’ve been flying head-on into the field of Human Factors. Sub-disciplines include Cognitive Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). It would appear to me that there isn’t one facet of the field of [...]

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Resilience Engineering Part II: Lenses

June 18, 2012

(this is part 2 of a series: here is part 1) One of the challenges of building and operating complex systems is that it’s difficult to talk about one facet or component of them without bleeding the conversation into other related concerns. That’s the funky thing about complex systems and systems thinking: components come together [...]

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The Devil’s In The Details

March 30, 2012

I’m a firm believer that context is everything, and that it’s needed in every constructive conversation we want to have as engineers. As a nascent (but adorable) engineering field, we discuss (in blogs, books, meetups, conferences, etc.) success and failure in a number of areas, including the ways in which we work. We don’t just [...]

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Each necessary, but only jointly sufficient

February 10, 2012

I thought it might be worth digging in a bit deeper on something that I mentioned in the Advanced Postmortem Fu talk I gave at last year’s Velocity conference. For complex socio-technical systems (web engineering and operations) there is a myth that deserves to be busted, and that is the assumption that for outages and [...]

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Convincing management that cooperation and collaboration was worth it

January 5, 2012

While searching around for something else, I came across this note I sent in late 2009 to the executive leadership of Yahoo’s Engineering organization. This was when I was leaving Flickr to work at Etsy. My intent on sending it was to be open to the rest of Yahoo about what how things worked at [...]

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Fault Tolerance and Protection

September 8, 2011

In yet another post where I point to a paper written from the perspective of another field of engineering about a topic that I think is inherently mappable to the web engineering world, I’ll at least give a summary. Every time someone on-call gets an alert, they should always be thinking along these lines: Does [...]

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