Human Factors

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →