And you are here why?

(Yeah, the above image is about  The Landing on the Hudson . We’ll get to that in a bit) How many times have you heard people complain about  Process , about how it  “stifles my creativity” , “ it’s always getting in the way ” and,  “if it weren’t for the process I’d be Getting Things Done” ? Don’t get me wrong — I agree that  if  it’s a bad process, and  if  it’s implemented poorly, and  if  the reasons are long since dust in the wind,  then , yeah, it’s a Bad Thing. But, then again, there are a lot of “ if ”s in that statement. And the reality is that most of the time, the thing that annoys people isn’t  The Process  in general, but  the specifics of the process as it applies to their very unique needs . • Alice doesn’t like having the standup at 8:30am because, well, who is actually sentient at 8:30am? • Bob is fine with the standup, but doesn’t like having to tag every commit with a ticket no. • Caro...

“ Netsplits are rare, so I don’t think about them ”  —  #CowboyDeveloper The thing about the above statement is that even if you aren’t a   #CowboyDeveloper , it’s not necessarily wrong .   That’s for a given value of “rare” mind you, and   you ignore it at your own risk . The question you should ask yourself before making the above statement is “ What is the risk associated with a netsplit? ”, and the answer to that should inform your engineering decisions (•). And that brings us to the main point here — this is not just engineering decisions about network partitions — it’s   all   your engineering decisions! So great — you assess the risks, plan / design accordingly, and it’s all copacetic, right? Well, no, and that’s because “assess the risks” is carrying a lot of water. The issue here is that the   people   implementing the systems are, well, human, and as humans, they are quite likely to end up with some combination of 1. “ If I don’t kn...