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When I was younger, I was very interested in learning new technologies as a way of becoming a better software developer. These days, I’m more interested in learning how to think better, in general. (thread)
By “think better”, I mean either improve my intuition, or learn techniques that can compensate for when my intuition is likely to fail me.
One example of improving intuition has been learning about systems thinking. It has certainly changed the way I think about systems in general, and incidents in particular. Dekker’s “Drift into failure” has been enormously influential here.
I’m still very interested in learning formal approaches for reasoning about distributed systems, like TLA+, or Burckhardt’s “Principles of eventual consistency”. I need cognitive tools here, because I don’t think I can develop an intuition about concurrency/distributed behavior.
I’m also interested in Bayesian statistics, once again, as a cognitive tool for reasoning about system behavior. Like the formal approaches, these are tools for building explicit models that you can use for reasoning.
The nice thing about all of these approaches is that they are independent of the specific software technologies that are used to actually build the system. These are “evergreen” approaches rather than “hot” ones (kubernetes! serverless!). Fin
