Talk to the Dummy

You’ve hit brain freeze. It seemed like such a great idea at the time, but now that it’s 2am, the application is down, and you can’t find the problem, maybe it wasn’t after all. Or maybe it’s 4pm, and you’re sitting at your desk trying to figure out how to resolve a problem, or build a system. You’re completely stuck, and you’ve no idea what to do next.

In either case, it feels like you’ve researched every avenue, you’ve thought of every angle, you’ve gone over the problem time and time again, and your brain just can’t wrap around the problem any longer. You go back over the same material again and again, just trying to make sense of it.

You’ve hit brain freeze. What’s the solution?

Talk to the dummy.

No, I don’t mean your boss. And I don’t mean that person down the hall you think just doesn’t “get it.” We’ll cover that topic later. I mean, literally, the dummy. In the “old days,” there were software shops that would literally set aside an office for a dummy. There was a white board, a desk, and a dummy sitting behind the desk. Your job, as an engineer, Continue reading

Bah’rain

Crazy Busy

For too many of us, the hustle and bustle of electronic activity is a sad expression of a deeper acedia. We feel busy, but not with a hobby or recreation or play. We are busy with busyness. Rather than figure out what to do with our spare minutes and hours, we are content to swim in the shallows and pass our time with passing the time.

The Problem with Peanuts

I was hungry. Perhaps that’s a good excuse, or perhaps not. Either way, I sat down after ordering, took a peanut, broke the nuts out of the shell, and ate them.

After eating the peanut, I felt less hungry. So I picked up another one and ate it, as well. Soon enough, long before I order came out in fact, I wasn’t really hungry any longer. I still ate, of course, because I’d bought the burger, and it was a good burger. The fries were pretty good, too. The sweet tea wasn’t shabby, either.

But I thought about the peanut it all started with as I ate the burger. You see, a peanut solved my hunger problem. So it one peanut solves my hunger, why couldn’t a pile of peanuts solve world hunger? So I took a pile of peanuts and put them on the table, considering something I’d never thought about before — I could solve world hunger. Right here, right now, in this place, I could actually solve a major problem the world has been struggling with for thousands of years.

Okay, but then where would I get these peanuts? The place I was in had boxes stacked Continue reading

Greenland

Pleasure

Act!

Part 1: Getting Inside the Loop
Part 2: Orientation
Part 3: Decide!

Once you’ve observed, oriented, and decided, it’s time to act. This might seem like a minor concept, but it’s actually really, really hard to act in a lot of situations. There are two elements here — the first is our willing suspension of belief, and the second is the doubt storm. Let’s talk about these two.

The willing suspension of belief. To find an example here, I’m going to fall back on my training in self defense. When you first find yourself in any situation that is “bad,” your first line of thought is going to be “this isn’t really happening,” or “why would this person want to hurt me?” In the same way, when your network is failing or under attack, the easiest thing in the world is to disregard the loop, roll over, and go back to sleep. Why would anyone attack my network? Why would this bug be hitting my control plane? Like Scrooge faced with a ghost, we say, “there’s more gravy than grave about you.” And this is a grave mistake. There’s a reason you’ve gone through all the trouble of Continue reading

He’s Dead, Jim

The Last Part of Nature to Surrender

Decide!

Last week we talked about orienteering — using models and information to orient ourselves to what’s going on in the network. This is part of the OODA loop, which we talked about two weeks ago. This week, let’s look at the next step — decide.

In fact: Decide! Now! How many hours have you spent thinking through what to decide? Which car to buy, which house to buy, which vacation to take, which… It seems like our life is a continuous stream of decisions through which we must dig deeply to make a choice. Sometimes it makes you want to replace your entire outfit with grey and black. Everything. Actually, we should feel blessed to have so many decisions — at least we’re not considering “eveningvear…” (note the ever fashionable flashlight).

But the last place you want to be is in the middle of a major network outage or attack, spending hours deciding — what was it we were deciding? By the time you get to the fifth pizza and the tenth box of bonbons, maybe you’ve forgotten what you are sitting in that “war room” for. There is another alternative, of course.

Decide what you’re going to decide before Continue reading

Williamsburg

The Value of Work

Orientation

Quick — can you OODA? Last week we talked about the general idea behind the OODA loop; this week we’ll cover the last three steps and wrap up.

Orient is the second step: once you’ve made a set of observations, you need to decide what it is you’re actually observing. To help this make sense, let’s take a look at a simple optical illusion — you might have seen it before.

Do the blue squares look square, or… ?? If you’re like most people, the squares don’t look square at all — but they are. Remember the blue or gold dress? In both of these situations, we face the same sort of problem: our ability to perceive is often influenced by the context.

This doesn’t, as some people try to say, mean that our senses are all just a jumbled up mess, and the entire world is disconnected from our brains — you must be careful in life not to make the hard or odd case the rule by which all other cases are measured. Every measurement system has its limits; that doesn’t mean the measurement is useless or generally untrustworthy.

So what we must do, as network engineers, is to Continue reading

Greenland

Wisdom

Getting Inside the Loop

Metadata doesn’t just apply to data science or protocols — it applies to engineering life. Think about the concept of epistomology — the study of how we know what we know — or the concept of hermeneutics — the study of how we understand communication — and you can quickly see that stepping outside what we are doing to examine how we are doing it is a common human experience (see Lewis’ Meditation in a Tool Shed as another instance).

But how does this apply to the engineering life? It’s called process — now, before you click off the page, scurrying away in shock, process isn’t a bad thing. In fact, process can be a good set of “guard rails” in the way we live our lives, something to remind us not to run off the road (like positive thinking signs), or even physically/mentally “bump” us in the right direction.

This week I’d like to kick off a short series on one process I learned in the US Air Force, and have used in many ways over the years — the OODA Loop. Originally developed by USAF Colonel John Boyd, and designed to help pilots deal with Continue reading

Church Pews

Courage Over Conformity

A Neutral ‘Net?

This week I’m going to step off the beaten path for a moment and talk about ‘net neutrality. It appears we are about to enter a new phase in the life of the Internet — at least in the United States — as the FCC is out and about implying we should expect a ruling on Title II regulation of the ‘net within the United States in the near future. What the FCC’s chairman has said is —

• The Internet would be reclassified as a Title II communication service, which means the portions within the United States would fall under the same regulations as telephone and television service.
• “comma, but…” The ‘net infrastructure in the United States won’t be subject to all the rules of Title II regulation.
• Specifically mentioned is the last mile, “there will be no rate regulation, no tariffs, no last-mile unbundling.”

A lot of digital ink has been spilled over how the proposed regulations will impact investment — for instance, AT&T has made a somewhat veiled threat that if the regulations don’t go the way they’d like to see them go, there will be no further investment in last mile broadband throughout the US (as Continue reading

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