Systems and Gardening

It’s been awhile since I’ve written. I’ve been busy coming up to speed as an SRE with an awesome new team!

It’s gardening season up here in the Northern Hemisphere and while I was dealing with some trees and bushes that had died with a recent ice storm, I thought about the similarities in dealing with systems.

  • It’s often more work to decommission a tree than it was to plant it. So it is with software..
  • Power tools help. Chain saws beat Axes.
  • NIH syndrome doesn’t work. We use many tools invented by others..
  • Occasionally, you need to invent a tool for specific situations. That can be fun!
  • Leverage. Many tools have longer handles to do bigger work..
  • Parallelism is awesome. If you can line many branches for cutting, it’s way more productive than dealing with them one-at-a-time.
  • Work that you don’t have to do is even better.. Finding steps that aren’t really required saves even more time.
  • Collaboration, gardening often works better with a partner.  [big thanks to my wife here..]
  • Taking out dead stuff can make room for new stuff.  That’s where the fun is!

Happy growing season!