"aviation" entries

Building for failure is a recipe for success

How you handle failure can mean the difference between "just another incident" and a revenue-stealing accident.

I was ready to get home. I’d been dozing throughout the flight from JFK to SFO, listening to the background chatter of Channel 9 as a lullaby. Somewhere over Sacramento, the rhythmic flow of controller-issued clearances and pilot confirmations was broken up by a call from our plane:

“NorCal Approach, United three-eighty-nine.”
“United three-eighty-nine, NorCal, go.”
“NorCal, United three-eighty-nine, we’d like to go ahead and…”

My headphones went silent, Channel 9 shut off.

I didn’t think too much of it as we continued our descent, flight attendants walking calmly through the cabin, getting us ready for landing. I had noticed our arrival path was one I was unfamiliar with, but nothing else seemed out of the ordinary… until we turned onto the final approach. In the turn, I noticed the unmistakable glint of firetrucks’ rotating red lights, lined up alongside the runway.

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Starting Small with Great Expectations

Explicit expectations are key to operating at scale

Our lives are rife with expectations.

When we flip the light switch, we expect electrons to flow; when we issue CPU instructions, we expect to get the correct answer; when we look at commit logs in the source repository, we (hopefully) expect tests to accompany them and that our colleagues have run them, pre-checkin. But we’ve all probably been burned by these types of assumptions at some point.

In an operational environment, like the large scale websites and build farms we’re responsible for, these sort of expectations can be a costly cause of errors, and are one of the prime sources of miscommunication. Many a postmortem has uncovered that some expectation the ops team had of the development team was actually an assumption… and we all know that old saying about assumptions and donkeys.

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Efficient, Effective Communication Still Often Elusive

In the operational environment, miscommunication can be costly; but there are some easy ways to improve it.

Editor’s note: This is part two in a four-part series on the “-ations” of aviation that can provide further insight into DevOps best practices and achieving them. Part one, on how standardization helps organizations scale and is actually a part of healthy DevOps culture, can be read here.

Communication is an enigmatic topic when it comes to engineering. Parts of our jobs—blueprints, chemical formulae, and source code—require extremely precise forms of communication (even if it doesn’t end up communicating to the steel, molecules, or silicon what we intended). But when it comes to email threads sifting through requirements, meetings about implementation styles and risk assessment, and software design documentation, we often fumble.

Let’s face it: there’s a reason the “engineer equals bad communicator” stereotype exists. But there are some simple things that can be done, both individually and technologically, to begin challenging that stereotype.

Dual Navigation Receivers Required

There are obviously many forms of communication. In an operational context, it’s useful to distinguish between static and active communication.

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Process Is Not a Four-Letter Word

Standardization done right can save your sanity and improve your culture

Capital-P “Process” ™ is something many software developers, operations engineers, system administrators, and even managers love to hate.

It is often considered a productivity-killing, innovation-stifling beast whose only useful domain is within the walls of some huge, hulking enterprise or sitting in a wiki nobody ever reads.

I have always found distaste for process fascinating and now even moreso that configuration management and version control have become such core tenets of the DevOps movement. The main purpose of those tools is to provide structure for software development and operations to increase reproducibility, reliability, and standardization of those activities.

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Developer Week in Review: End of an era

Steve Jobs and CmdrTaco resign, iPads and pilots, and a call for Android on the TouchPad

This week two major players in geek culture called it quits, more airlines decided to replace dead trees with hot silicon, and the HP TouchPad seeks a new OS for a long-term relationship.