I’m happy to have seen the discussion of this, and I’m glad you’re running this ritual (performance? experiment? game? Even with all this discussion, it still likely means different things to different people, and I believe that’s OK). I’m honored to have been given a code, even though it was over by the time I knew about it.
I look forward to next year’s post-mortem, especially your selection of participants. I genuinely can’t predict whether you’ll include Chris_Leong. If you exclude them, that’s some indication that you’re selecting against people who think and write about the topic, making it a less impressive feat if the button goes unpressed. If you include them, that’s (probably) an increased risk of another failure.
I also look forward to seeing if I qualify. The only reason I didn’t press it this year is that I didn’t give it any thought either way, and by the time I paid attention it was already over. I suspect that next year I will be more involved. Exactly what that means will depend a lot on the framing and discussion of the event.
At the base, I still am uncertain exactly how to take it. I remain absolutely convinced that human-factors root cause of the outage is “feature pushed to production which was designed to make the homepage unavailable, worked as intended.” The next level of analysis would be “why is it considered acceptable to write such code?”, not “why would someone be so foolish as to enter a code which a site admin went to a lot of effort to send them?”.
Without a whole lot of discussion and agreement about the purpose and value of the exercise, how is it even in the realm of understandable that we would judge someone more harshly for entering the code than for devising the system and e-mailing codes to hundreds of people?
I’m happy to have seen the discussion of this, and I’m glad you’re running this ritual (performance? experiment? game? Even with all this discussion, it still likely means different things to different people, and I believe that’s OK). I’m honored to have been given a code, even though it was over by the time I knew about it.
I look forward to next year’s post-mortem, especially your selection of participants. I genuinely can’t predict whether you’ll include Chris_Leong. If you exclude them, that’s some indication that you’re selecting against people who think and write about the topic, making it a less impressive feat if the button goes unpressed. If you include them, that’s (probably) an increased risk of another failure.
I also look forward to seeing if I qualify. The only reason I didn’t press it this year is that I didn’t give it any thought either way, and by the time I paid attention it was already over. I suspect that next year I will be more involved. Exactly what that means will depend a lot on the framing and discussion of the event.
At the base, I still am uncertain exactly how to take it. I remain absolutely convinced that human-factors root cause of the outage is “feature pushed to production which was designed to make the homepage unavailable, worked as intended.” The next level of analysis would be “why is it considered acceptable to write such code?”, not “why would someone be so foolish as to enter a code which a site admin went to a lot of effort to send them?”.
Without a whole lot of discussion and agreement about the purpose and value of the exercise, how is it even in the realm of understandable that we would judge someone more harshly for entering the code than for devising the system and e-mailing codes to hundreds of people?
Lol, I like this comment. I am gonna write that post, setting out a full explanation for the tradition...