Hyperbolic time chamber and systems

Hey!

Last week I was experimenting with Upwork to see if I could make it work. Well, it didn’t work. It was clear by Tuesday that it wasn’t going to work for me right now.

After reflecting on the situation and having a good thought-provoking conversation, I reached a few conclusions:

• Contracting isn’t as good as it was in the past in the UK. Laws changed.

• If I want to create a startup, what’s really stopping me? I was given the advice that I could go to incubators and find a non-technical partner. Another piece of advice was that founders don’t know what they are doing, which doesn’t surprise me.

• I can explore side hustles while I work in a company.

My savings are not what they used to be, after taking this relatively long break, so creating a startup and taking the extra risk doesn’t sound great at the moment. On top of it, I want to keep improving my craftsmanship. While I feel I’m in a good position in terms of density of experience, there is so much more to learn… I’d love to go to a hyperbolic time chamber, and stay there for a while. Conflicting interests.

So, where is my head at? I’m prioritizing going back to the market with the thought of creating something on my own in the future.

This week’s briefer:

• Who destroyed Three Mile Island?

• The Chocolate Cake Problem

• Microservices thread by Dave Farley

This fascinating talk describes what happened in a nuclear accident in Three Mile Island.

The lesson of the talk is that when we’re trying to figure out why something went wrong, we have to start from the assumption that human error is never the cause, it’s only the symptom of underlying systemic problems. Blaming an issue on human error keeps us from figuring out what really went wrong.

Nickolas also tells us that there are two types of stories: first stories and second stories.

First stories focus on the humans, what they did wrong or could’ve done better, they blame them, and are biased because we already know what happened.

Second stories frame human error as an effect on the vulnerabilities deeper inside the organization. To get the second stories, we have to see what happened from the perspective of the people involved and try to understand why they did what they did. We have to assume they had the best intentions, and that they took the best decisions they could with the information they had available at that moment.

After touching on human error and systemic problems, this article by Rich Mironov covers the misalignment of incentives on software companies.

Fantastic thread about microservices, what they are and what they aren’t. I’ve lived the effects of bad microservices, where even to breathe or blink there was a microservice. Overall, it was just a mess of a distributed monolith.