"What should I measure when the CEO asks for engineering metrics?" is probably the most frequently recurring eng leadership question, and connects into a larger, somewhat nebulous topic: how should you measure engineering organizations?

The biggest challenge with answering this question directly imo is that there are a number of different stakeholders who all want very different things. Literal answers anchor on one stakeholders rather than solving for whole set.

https://lethain.com/measuring-engineering-organizations/

I cannot keep this to myself. There is a website (radio.garden) where you can listen to radio stations all over the world for free. No log in. No email address. Nothing.

When the site loads, you are looking at the globe. Slide the little white circle over the green dots (each green dot is a radio station) until you find one you like.

I have been listening to this station in the Netherlands and it absolutely slaps.

EDIT: Replies tell me that this doesn't function in the UK without a VPN.

The recent problems with Southwest Airlines is a good example of a Metastable failure at scale in the physical world:

TRIGGERs: Capacity reducing triggers (reduced staff capacity due to sickness, snow storms at Denver, Chicago, and the rest of the country).

AMPLIFICATION: Capacity degradation amplification caused by a combination of factors such as:
—-point to point business model meant the crew is not in the right places,
—-scheduling software breaking down resulting in manual matching of flights to crews - (can’t even imagine how tedious this would have been…kudos to the manual schedulers)
—-crew not able to communicate with the airlines (!) due to phone systems being down, likely due to a metastable failure of the phone system caused by overload due to customers trying to reach the airline for rescheduling..

So, even if the matching of a flight to a crew was done, the crew might not have been aware of that assignment! So, even as “system capacity” (airport, flights, crew) started becoming available, they couldn’t be used effectively…

MITIGATION: As with many metastable failure mitigations, load shedding was the mitigation- they temporarily reduced the number of flights to 1/3rd of the usual number…

Looks like the airline was running the system in an extremely vulnerable state (optimizing for high turnaround time to improve efficiency and packing the schedule without any headroom to handle overloads caused by capacity degradation).

Hope they do a thorough incident analysis using the metastable failure framework and make improvements…

References:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/27/business/southwest-airlines-service-meltdown/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/29/business/southwest-airlines-service-meltdown/index.html

RT @[email protected]

How much memory does my program use? It is a frequent question on Stackoverflow. Peeps usually try to use top, atop, ps...These tools give mixed, confusing info. Instead read my blog post where I show modern Linux memory tools(cgroups, page-types, procfs): https://biriukov.dev/docs/page-cache/7-how-much-memory-my-program-uses-or-the-tale-of-working-set-size/

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/brk0v/status/1607871538522656768

He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.

When you refactor during a change, you make the change bigger.

When you refactor before the change, you make the change smaller.

- in a talk by Jason Swett