haven't been writing up paper notes recently. Reason is, I've accepted to go talk at a conference, which is close enough to meet my personal criteria. So all my spare time going to reading up and annotating papers is spent prepping a talk for Vanessa Huerta Granda's Resilience Engineering track at QCon New York 2023.
The abstract goes something like this:
When dealing with an environment that feels chaotic and unreliable, a common tendency is to look for ways to reduce variability and bring things back under control through procedures, hierarchy, metrics, and standardization. However, these attempts are often unsuccessful due to the inherent complexity of these systems: they can't fit in anyone's head, and are too unruly despite all efforts.
I suggest that we relax these ideas of control, and increase focus on flexibility and adaptability. These, and other ideas coming from Resilience Engineering can help us create a toolkit to embrace surprise, and foster a richer view of systems that can extend our abilities to respond both to unforeseen challenges, but also to unexpected opportunities.
In this talk, I'll present various small approaches and patterns that slowly influence how teams deal with reliability, and highlight some of the key interactions and behaviors I keep finding work well in the organizations I've been part of. In the end you can't really cancel out the chaos, but you can embrace the complexity and deal with it a bit better.
My talk is titled Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops, but that's mostly because their guidelines state that a talk title should be descriptive of what takeaways you'd find in it.
I was a much bigger fan of my original idea of "it's all going to hell anyway; all we can do is influence how long it takes", which would carry the same points, but be far more representative of my general outlook on things.
I'm still debating just showing up on stage with hand-drawn slides at this point though. Something like this:

It feels somewhat safer than showing up with my own custom slideshow software, something I did already because I have so many bad ideas. I guess I could always load up the hand-drawn images in the custom software. That might feel appropriate.
Talk is next week, but in the meanwhile here’s an interview I gave InfoQ about some of the topics I’ll cover: https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/06/embracing-complexity/
and as promised in some other post, here's the talk transcript: https://ferd.ca/embrace-complexity-tighten-your-feedback-loops.html
