John Allspaw wrote a fascinating roundup of his thoughts on the 6th Resilience Engineering Symposium.
This, in particular, caught my eye:
There is no Resilience Engineering (or Cognitive Systems Engineering or Systems Safety for that matter) without real dialogue about real practice in the world. In other words, there is no such thing as purely academic here.
(via @jon_moore)
If you’ve been following the controversy around Reddit lately (Wired), you might be surprised. The reality is that the challenge of keeping an online community healthy as it grows is tremendous.
One community that has faced many of those challenges successfully over the years is Metafilter. Metafilter is of the strongest examples of online community anywhere on the Web, and has been since 1999. It’s a remarkable story that not enough are aware of, but that might be one of the secrets to its success.
Last month they published a new “State of Metafilter” update, documenting the improvements they’ve been implementing, as well as handling some monumental comings and goings of the team.
Keep Metafilter going with a donation. Better yet, make your donation a subscription, as I have, so that donations are scheduled periodically.
Not sure where I caught this, but since July 4th is upcoming, reading about the Ekklesia Citizens’ Assembly felt timely. Take a few moments and learn about one of the first, if not the first, democratic assembly. An influence on the writing we celebrate in a couple days.
They paid people to take time off to vote. Wouldn’t it be great to finally have that national holiday, at minimum?
Cameron Barrett has resumed blogging on his domain that has history going back to 1997. If you are unfamiliar with his work, check it out. Better yet, subscribe to his feed.
My thoughts and prayers for his entire family and to all who have known him. Comcast has been a great place to work, and has been great for family, and to give back to my community, and I know that springs in no small part to its founder.
Comcast: Ralph J. Roberts, Comcast Corporation Founder and Chairman Emeritus, Dies at Age 95
Philly.com: Comcast founder Ralph Roberts, 95, dies
Philadelphia Magazine: Ralph J. Roberts: My Philadelphia Story
June, 2015
I’ve just finished an eight week mindfulness course and I’ve been asked a few times if I got anything out it. Yes I have: I improved my card playing technique.
Hear me out.
There is a card playing metaphor me and my little brother have shared through the years to help get through difficult times: The goal is to play the hand you’ve been dealt, to the best of your ability. Don’t think too hard about the hands you’ve been dealt in the past, or worry about the cards which may come in the future, they are are out of your control.
If you spend too much time looking at the past, or worrying about the future, you will not make the best choice you can in the moment.
People who know me well, know I quote this quite a bit. It sounds so simple, but think of your own experience, and you know it is anything but.
The next few hands might mean winning or losing everything, and this day has been nothing but work, work, work, and you’re always losing these things so why are you sitting there anyway, and.. well.. Your adrenaline is probably pumping, and the moment you’re in might feel like the most critical moment EVAR. What happens next is what matters… right?
Hold onto that for a moment while I shift gears. I promise to return to this.
But first, let me ask you, doesn’t time start to really fly as we age? Blink and days, weeks, even months seem to zip by.
That’s because most moments, maybe this one if you are skimming (you probably are, lets be honest), are not an examined moments. Intentionally or not, as our experience grows, so do the stories we mentally collect, to filter our world by.
It is absolutely necessary. We need to do it to survive. Pondering the rain can keep you from seeking shelter and avoiding a lightning strike, and lightning rods are awesome.
It is probably the advanced pattern matching ability we have that differentiates humans from most animal life. And from one another.
We see someone react well, or poorly, under certain circumstances and we think that it is a sure sign of their innate intelligence, or their innate resilience. When, underneath it all, the truth is, they’ve had some experience, some teaching, some lesson that got absorbed.
Watch children play before they get too caught up in thinking before acting. They are experiencing the moment fully and learning from it. Sight, smell, sound, everything is getting recorded for pattern analysis and reuse. That’s why time moves so slow for them. Each moment is a learnable moment. Forming connections, stories, experiences that will get used in future situations. There is a lot of input getting written to memory. Absorbing that takes time and energy. So time moves slow.
Eventually all kids start to think about the future and the past, and that removes them from the current moment. How is school going suck tomorrow? Why didn’t my so called friend call me back? Time moves faster as the now is less and less examined. It does that because they no longer are in the current moment. They’re elsewhere.
When this becomes habit, whenever they are in a moment where there isn’t flooded with new stimuli (even though all moments are unique, how quickly we lose that!), you’ll hear, “I’m bored”.
So, full circle, back to the metaphor, the card game. The class has given me some techniques to get my head in the moment, to strengthen the quality of my attention, and to do so non-judgmentally. So I can hopefully see my hand of cards and recognize my mind’s attempts at zipping to the future or the past, to see the moment as a teachable one, once again.
Hearing classmates share their own struggles and journeys helped me to realize I wasn’t so alone. As our instructor shared, though we may all have different experiences, we feel similar things. We weren’t as isolated as we may think. Speaking of the instructors, I’m thankful for how they constructed the class, its pace, and making it easier to connect with concepts that can be very abstract and hard to grasp with self study.
Being non-judgemental is key. It’s necessary in order to observe those stories, those filters, that might have once been all important, when now they limit the choices I might make, or the enjoyment I might feel, if I let myself take in something fully.
As a child might, with a beginners mind.
And it’s not easy. It’s not about relaxing or positive thinking. It’s work to take your head out of your ass once it gets used to being there. It’s forming new habits to replace the old.
That means practice, one day at a time. One moment at a time.
That Ferris Bueller quote now seems far more deep now doesn’t it?
Watch the inspiring news segment on the RoboLancers at NBC10. Go RoboLancers!
35 minutes that are absolutely worth it. Watch Jacob Kaplan-Moss at PyCon 2015 explain why he is a ‘mediocre programmer’ and why we need to take a hard look at our industry, how we define our careers, and the myths we tell, because they are flawed, and we are all the lesser as long as it remains so:
In distributed systems, failure is normal. Hardware failures that are rare, when multiplied by thousands of machines, become common. Therefore failures are assumed, designs work around them, and software anticipates them. Failure is an expected part of the landscape.
— Thomas A. Limoncelli, Strata R. Chalup, Christina J. Hogan, “The Practice of Cloud System Administration”
It is human nature to look for patterns and to assign them meaning when we find them. Kahneman and Tversky analyzed many of the shortcuts we employ in assessing patterns in data and in making judgments in the face of uncertainty. They dubbed those shortcuts heuristics. In general, heuristics are useful, but just as our manner of processing optical information sometimes leads to optical illusions, so heuristics sometimes lead to systematic error. Kahneman and Tversky called such errors biases. We all use heuristics, and we all suffer from biases. But although optical illusions seldom have much relevance in our everyday world, cognitive biases play an important role in human decision making. And so in the late twentieth century a movement sprang up to study how randomness is perceived by the human mind. Researchers concluded that “people have a very poor conception of randomness; they do not recognize it when they see it and they cannot produce it when they try,” and what’s worse, we routinely misjudge the role of chance in our lives and make decisions that are demonstrably misaligned with our own best interests.
— Thomas A. Limoncelli, Strata R. Chalup, Christina J. Hogan, “The Practice of Cloud System Administration”