We are at the end of the Reset Phase. And this last week was all about Science. Science is more than just something that exists, is something that we achieve every single day. Science is like that little cousin that is always asking why? but… why WHY?
I don’t think we have mastered the why in many things, but because of many great people, we are an infinitesimal step beyond that.
Pretotyping (not a typo!)
The first assignment from this week was to test three ideas using the pretotype technique, and yes, is not a typo. The Pretotyping Technique — a set of tools, techniques, and tactics designed to help you validate an idea for a new product quickly, objectively, and accurately.
Essentially, pretotyping is going to help you/your team in making sure that you are building The Right It before you build It right.
For this especially task we (the Academy) starting developing these ideas. We establish three hypotheses for three specific tasks, and by using the pretotyping technique we found that we were building something right before we start developing and escalating.
Lessons of Richard Feynman
Before this week I did not know who Richard Feynman was. One thing that felt familiar was this quote:
You must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
He says this quote in one of his many lectures. Feynman was one of the big minds in the 20th Century. He dedicated his life to bongs and theoretical physics; more specifically quantum mechanics. He even won a Nobel Prize in 1965.
His lessons, among many things, were related to science. Quoting him:
Science is the understanding of behavior nature. It is fundamentally about contributing to the improvement of the human condition.
He viewed science as something not radical, but rather natural. He was a really curious cat, he not only was a pioneer in the field of physics, but also a very important one. Education.
It is a very dangerous policy to teach students only how to get certain results rather than how to experiment with scientific integrity.
Science was about falling, it is a natural procedure after all. To achieve science we need to go hand in hand with uncertainty.
The Field of Chaos Engineering
Entropy — a simply a measure of disorder and affects all aspects of our daily lives. In fact, you can think of it as nature’s tax. Left unchecked disorder increases over time. Energy disperses, and systems dissolve into chaos.
I would not talk about how to avoid entropy or chaos. But rather how to make chaos.
Chaos Engineering is a disciplined approach to identifying failures before they become outages. By proactively testing how a system responds under stress, you can identify and fix failures before they end up in the news.
How you ever check the trends in Twitter just to verify that indeed WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. is not working? This is exactly what Chaos Engineering wants to avoid. Essentially, breaking things on purpose.
This field started around 2010 with Netflix. The Engineering Team on Netflix created Chaos Monkey a tool that is mainly responsible for terminating instances in production. They wanted to test their system stability by enforcing failure. A pretty risky technique, but really effective for testing systems readability. This field became so successful that in 2011 Netflix announced The Simian Army, a series of these tools.
Once you grasp your mind around it and see it with a big picture it can be really helpful, especially since systems are becoming more and more complex. You don’t even know what is broken. With this practice, you can have a bigger understanding. Were learning from failure is actually a thing.
Well…
Once you get more knowledge of the hundreds of fields in Software Engineering, I prove my hypothesis more. There is plenty to learn, more than you could learn in a lifetime. But the concept is not to know everything, but rather to get open to learning everything.
