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The Devil’s In The Details
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...
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Human Factors and Web Engineering’s Intersection
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...
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Fundamental: Stress-Strain Curves In Web Engineering
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...
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A Mature Role for Automation: Part I
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...
View ArticlePrevention versus Governance versus Adaptive Capacities
The other day I posted about the intersections of Systems Safety and web operations and engineering. One of the largest proponents of bringing a systems thinking perspective to safety (specifically...
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Owning Attention (Considerations for Alert Design)
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...
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A Mature Role for Automation: Part II
(Courtney Nash’s excellent post on this topic inadvertently pushed me to finally finish this – give it a read) In the last post on this topic, I hoped to lay the foundation for what a mature role for...
View ArticleLearning from Failure at Etsy
(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...
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Engineering’s Relationship To Science
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...
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Translations Between Domains: David Woods
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...
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The Infinite Hows (or, the Dangers Of The Five Whys)
(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...
View ArticleAn Open Letter To Monitoring/Metrics/Alerting Companies
I’d like to open up a dialogue with companies who are selling X-As-A-Service products that are focused on assisting operations and development teams in tracking the health and performance of their...
View ArticleSome Principles of Human-Centered Computing
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...
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Reflections on the 6th Resilience Engineering Symposium
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...
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Invited article in IEEE Software – Technical Debt: Challenges and Perspectives
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...
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