John Allspaw
Engineering leader and writer on web operations and resilience engineering; formerly SVP of Technical Operations at Etsy and co-author of Web Operations.
John Allspaw did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Our reading
Anomaly detection in software is an unsolved problem that cannot be solved by software or companies.
Their wordsAnomaly detection in software is, and always will be, an unsolved problem. Your company will not solve it. Your software will not solve it.
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Our reading
The world is in the business of dynamic fault management rather than simple troubleshooting.
Their wordsStop thinking you're trying to solve a troubleshooting problem; you're not. The world you're trying to sell to is in the business of dynamic fault management.
- 6 months earlier
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Their wordsThis post explains my reasoning for discarding it, and how using it has the potential to be harmful, not helpful, to an organization.
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Their wordsThis is a construction that ignores a huge amount of complexity in an event, and it's the complexity that we want to explore if we have any hope of learning anything.
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Their wordsWe're constructing them, not finding them. We're constructing them because we are the ones that are choosing where (and when) to start asking questions, and where/when to stop asking the questions.
- 6 months earlier
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Their wordsI do hope that it's not too controversial to state that doing science is not the same as doing engineering.
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Their wordsI'd like to further state that the difference, in some part, lies in the discretionary space that engineers have in both the design and operation of their creations.
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Their wordsScience alone doesn't care about our intentions, while engineering cares very much about our intentions.
- 6 months earlier
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Their wordsIn the language of my domain, using counterfactuals in the process of explanation and prevention is an anti-pattern, and I'll explain why.
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Our reading
People's actions are driven by local rationality based on their specific context and goals.
Their wordsPeople do what makes sense to them, given their focus, their goals, and what they perceive to be their environment. This is known as the local rationality principle, and it is required in order to tease out second stories, which in turn is required for learning from failure.
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Their wordsNo decision maker has omniscience about results, so the severity of the outcome cannot be seen to be proportional to the quality of thought that went into the decisions or actions that led up to the result.
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsComputers deciding what is important to alert on is and will always be brittle.
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Their wordsIf we have any hope of making progress in monitoring complex systems, we must take this boundary into account.
- 9 months earlier
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Their wordsI've mentioned it elsewhere, but I must emphasize the point more: the degree to which other people want to work with you is a direct indication on how successful you'll be in your career as an engineer.
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Their wordsImmature engineers discover them in hindsight, disgusted. Mature engineers spell them out at the onset of a project, accept them and recognize them as part of good engineering.
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Their wordsBeing empathetic in this sense means having the ability to view the project from another person's perspective and to take that into consideration into your own work.