Complex Systems – Kitchen Soap

Invited article in IEEE Software – Technical Debt: Challenges and Perspectives

September 26, 2017 by allspaw

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 […]

Multiple Perspectives On Technical Problems and Solutions

August 12, 2017 by allspaw

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 […]

Reflections on the 6th Resilience Engineering Symposium

June 26, 2015 by allspaw

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. […]

Some Principles of Human-Centered Computing

June 16, 2015 by allspaw

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 […]

Stress, Strain, and Reminders

February 2, 2015 by allspaw

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 […]

The Infinite Hows (or, the Dangers Of The Five Whys)

November 14, 2014 by allspaw

(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 […]

Teaching Engineering As A Social Science

August 27, 2014 by allspaw

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 […]

High Tempo, High Consequence

March 13, 2014 by allspaw

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 […]

Counterfactual Thinking, Rules, and The Knight Capital Accident

October 29, 2013 by allspaw

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 […]

Learning from Failure at Etsy

September 30, 2013 by allspaw

(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 […]