Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Socio-Technical Systems and the STAQ Development Manual (Redacted)

I recently wrote a development manual for STAQ (embedded below). It represents our current thinking about the best way to build enterprise SaaS software in 2015 - using a variety of techniques from several disciplines. Since I wrote this I have also become very interested in resilience engineering and the notion that web developers are primarily engaged in the construction of socio-technical systems. When I rewrite this I plan to talk about how we should try to minimize mean-time-to-recover (MTTR) instead of mean-time-between-failures (MTBF), and how continuous deployment grows a safety culture around your operations.

I redacted most of the examples that illustrate these points because they use sensitive code examples or URLs. If you want to see the rest of slides, join us!

Side note: I tweeted that "all programmers are self-taught" which was greeted by some skepticism. When I learned about socio-technical systems I thought it was a pretty good distillation of what I meant; you can go to school to learn how to write algorithms, but as far as I know, nobody is teaching classes in writing software that comprises "an interlinked, systems based mixture of people, technology and their environment."


Sunday, September 13, 2015

Google Hangout URL for tonight's ignitespeak open source orientation

I don't think the last post made this clear, but here's the link to tonight's Google hangout session, where I will be conducting an orientation of the app and how it works and what we need.

Here's an embed of the event!

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Project orientation for ignitespeak on 9/13

I'll be holding an online orientation session for the ignitespeak project on Sunday, 9/13/15 at 8:00 pm. It'll be a Google Hangout, and we'll record it in case you can't make it.

I wanted to do something efficient to help get everyone up to speed. Right now everyone's getting bogged-down in setup issues.