Think of incidents as landmarks when finding your way. The tradeoffs you make can inform the type of incidents you get, and they in turn let you evaluate how you balance priorities and goal conflicts.| ferd.ca
In this post I’ll expose my current theory of agentic programming: people are amazing at adapting the tools they’re given and totally underestimate the extent to which they do it, and the amount of skill we build doing that is an incidental consequence of how badly the tools are designed. I’ll first cover some of the drive behind AI assistant adoption in software, the stochastic-looking divide in expectations and satisfactions with these tools, and the desire to figure out an explanatio...| Ferd.ca
I like to think that I write code deliberately. I’m an admittedly slow developer, and I want to believe I do so on purpose. I want to know as much as I can about the context of what it is that I'm automating. I also use a limited set of tools. I used old computers for a long time, both out of an environmental mindset, but also because a slower computer quickly makes it obvious when something scales poorly.1 The idea is to seek friction, and harness it as an early signal that whatever I’m ...| Ferd.ca
This post originally appeared on the LFI blog but I decided to post it on my own as well. Every organization has to contend with limits: scarcity of resources, people, attention, or funding, friction from scaling, inertia from previous code bases, or a quickly shifting ecosystem. And of course there are more, like time, quality, effort, or how much can fit in anyone's mind. There are so many ways for things to go wrong; your ongoing success comes in no small part from the people within your s...| Ferd.ca
A list of questions you need to ask about potential AI solutions, to know if they're going to work well for you and what kind of surprises they'll create.| ferd.ca
OK, queues.| ferd.ca
We try to get rid of the complexity, control it, and seek simplicity. I think framing things that way is misguided. Complexity has to live somewhere. Embrace it| ferd.ca
Incident reviews can be productive enough to be considered an action item on their own, if you have the right perspective and can avoid a few traps.| ferd.ca
Counting incidents to measure success is a misguided effort, much like counting forest fires does not tell you much about how good your operations are.| ferd.ca
The law of stretched systems, and how it may also apply to cognitive work, and our ability to deal complexity, such that any improvement is instantly exploited and we forever operate at the edge of understandability| ferd.ca
This is a loose transcript (or long paraphrasing?) of a presentation given at ConnectDev'16, a conference organized by Genetec in which I was invited to speak.| ferd.ca
Transcript of my IRConf talk on the framing and construction of errors in incident reviews| ferd.ca
