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It's an interesting comparison. Looking back in the history of software, "A pattern language" was an architectural treatise which inspired the software concept

It's an interesting comparison. Looking back in the history of software, "A pattern language" was an architectural treatise which inspired the software concept of "software design patterns". Similarly, I can see that considering the known issues with top-down vs. bottom-up city planning/evolution could be beneficial for software-centric organizations too; the issues with badly-fit top-down city plans seem to match very well with the pains of an ill-fit software architecture that's mandated from an ivory tower, complete with users using the planned cities "wrong". I'm sure there are differences though. You have a lot more observability into your software systems, and at the end of the day, they are orders of magnitude less complicated than cities, so you can comprehend more of the system at once, and truly find common usecases to standardize around. This is in contrast to cities where it's impossible to really know every citizen's unique needs, temperament, and usage patterns. Worth thinking about more; given the relatively low cross-pollination rates between the fields, I suspect there are more lessons that software engineers could glean from architecture and city planning.

ssivark 6y ago
A key underlying assumption in Scott’s perspective in “Seeing like a State” is that diversity is critically important to healthy functioning of biological/human/cultural ecosystems. In large computing system fleets we’re often okay with the opposite — simplifying by fiat because the understanding/control of the architect is more important than the diversity of individual machine configurations. Yes, the monoculture could lead to correlated failures (Eg: all machines are vulnerable to the same exploit), but the common perspective is that the simplicity/controllability and efficiency gains are worth it. I think we might be able to get by with this perspective so long as we’re seeing computers/systems only as inert tools. It’s interesting to consider whether there’s any motivation for that to change, as we move towards more ubiquitous & intelligent computing. (Eg: should IOT devices be thought akin to insects?)
- WJW 6y ago
  One of the key differences is that (the various components of) nature has no common goal except that each individual component wants to reproduce, while large computing systems are almost always constructed to achieve some particular objective. Thus, nature is OK with it if predators randomly kill some percent of the population while most factories would frown very much if a random employee started sabotaging lathes or something.. You could argue that netflix-style chaos engineering is an attempt to introduce more resilience into the system precisely by mimicking natures "anything can die at any moment" principle, but even then it typically only applies to computers. Netflix is known for firing fast but I don't think even they would consider randomly firing employees to make sure there are no single points of failure in the employee makeup. Would be interesting though: tax filing need to be submitted next Tuesday but the CFO was just fired, what is your recovery plan?
  - Kalium 6y ago
    I've encountered the idea of a Chaos HR Simian. People get random, unplanned, multi-week vacations. Mentioned here: https://www.cognitect.com/blog/2016/3/24/the-new-normal-embracing-failure-with-netflix-the-chaos-monkey-and-chaos-kong https://www.cognitect.com/blog/2016/3/24/the-new-normal-embr... I know I've been on teams that were significantly disrupted by jury duty, medical incidents, traffic accidents, etc. So it seems like a reasonable way to simulate this.

ssivark 6y ago

A key underlying assumption in Scott’s perspective in “Seeing like a State” is that diversity is critically important to healthy functioning of biological/human/cultural ecosystems. In large computing system fleets we’re often okay with the opposite — simplifying by fiat because the understanding/control of the architect is more important than the diversity of individual machine configurations. Yes, the monoculture could lead to correlated failures (Eg: all machines are vulnerable to the same exploit), but the common perspective is that the simplicity/controllability and efficiency gains are worth it. I think we might be able to get by with this perspective so long as we’re seeing computers/systems only as inert tools. It’s interesting to consider whether there’s any motivation for that to change, as we move towards more ubiquitous & intelligent computing. (Eg: should IOT devices be thought akin to insects?)

WJW 6y ago
One of the key differences is that (the various components of) nature has no common goal except that each individual component wants to reproduce, while large computing systems are almost always constructed to achieve some particular objective. Thus, nature is OK with it if predators randomly kill some percent of the population while most factories would frown very much if a random employee started sabotaging lathes or something.. You could argue that netflix-style chaos engineering is an attempt to introduce more resilience into the system precisely by mimicking natures "anything can die at any moment" principle, but even then it typically only applies to computers. Netflix is known for firing fast but I don't think even they would consider randomly firing employees to make sure there are no single points of failure in the employee makeup. Would be interesting though: tax filing need to be submitted next Tuesday but the CFO was just fired, what is your recovery plan?
- Kalium 6y ago
  I've encountered the idea of a Chaos HR Simian. People get random, unplanned, multi-week vacations. Mentioned here: https://www.cognitect.com/blog/2016/3/24/the-new-normal-embracing-failure-with-netflix-the-chaos-monkey-and-chaos-kong https://www.cognitect.com/blog/2016/3/24/the-new-normal-embr... I know I've been on teams that were significantly disrupted by jury duty, medical incidents, traffic accidents, etc. So it seems like a reasonable way to simulate this.