These two posts dive into John Allspaw's (previous Head of Engineering at Etsy) Masters Thesis on heuristics on decision making under pressure, specifically in the context of dealing with an outage to a software service: https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/01/22/trade-offs-under-pressure-part-1/ and https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/01/24/trade-offs-under-pressure-part-2/ There are two noteworthy aspects to this: firstly the subject matter itself is useful. It identifies heuristics that engineers use to make trade-offs during outages. The second noteworthy thing is the methodology used: it demonstrates both an excellent methodology for conducting incident reviews. The visualization and classification of the timeline is very informative.
One of my side projects for this year is to learn the programming language, Forth. Some people might consider this an odd language to learn. It is not a popular language. There are no hot startups using it (that I know of). It doesn't even show up in the top 100 languages in the TIOBE Index . However, I am convinced learning it is worthwhile. Some of my reasons for this are: Forth is probably the most successful and widely deployed language that nobody has heard of. It is the language used to develop OpenFirmware . This boot loader is installed on the laptops of the One Laptop Per Child Project , on PowerPC based Apple Mac computers, and on SPARC based computers from SUN Microsystems. It has also been used to develop to develop control software for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory , which is where it was developed. While not as widely used as C/C++, Forth is used a lot in embedded applications and has been ported to most micro-controllers. For example, the Forth, Inc. w
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