Complexity / Music / Technology / Intuition / Poetry / Listening
Repeat incidents are a Yin-Yang thing
The story of repeat incidents feels a lot like this. They were not the same, they repeated themselves, they contained failure, they contained success, they looked familiar and comfortable, they looked unrecognizable and scary, they held discovery and enlightenment, they brought ambiguity and fear, we had all the right observability, we had nothing before us…
Complex systems need flexible response more than central control
As part of my job as SRE Advocate, I am responsible for our “Continuous Improvement” and “Applied Resilience Engineering” programs. Those are two very big words for teacher and coach. I love this work and sometimes believe I missed a calling not going into Music Education, although I am drawing heavily from my music background to do it. More so than ever before.
Parts aren't as important as the interactions they adopt
We have been working on Service Level Objectives (SLO) at my work. It isn’t easy. We get into a lot of discussions (arguments?) about why an SLO is not a contractural Service Level Agreement (SLA). Some want to instrument every piece of service functionality and have a big bag of SLI parts to pick from instead of identifying groups of components that can be represented as a binary value of “User is Happy. User is NOT happy.”
The beginning of learning and acceptance
After I completed my undergraduate music degree at Virginia Tech, I stayed in Blacksburg for another year because I had no idea what to do with my life. Coming off running the VT Music department’s gopher and www site on a Mac LC running MacBSD (I used to praise us for being one of the first music departments on the internet in like 1992), I had a mind to be what we called back then a “webmaster”. But really I wanted to design and build and teach using multimedia music…
How trauma and music guided me into the art of building for adaptation
When I took the SAT in high school, I didn’t study. In the past I’ve told people about it, claiming it was the fault of the standardized testing regime and my not studying was a form of protest. In a lot of ways, the SAT shouldn’t be studied for… the middle word is “Aptitude”. Presumably the SAT measured what you’ve learned in school. I argued that if that were the case, I should take it without studying.