Currently very keen to talk to companies trying to hire Elixir developers and have a chat about what the major challenges are. If you are doing this or have someone to refer, send them to lars@underjord.io.

Planning on ramping that part of what I do as August swings around and I get back to work. Very keen to get back into the swing of things. Also having a very good time doing summer things with the family :)

Sustainable, resilient, durable .. lean?

The pandemic gave us all a good reminder about the trade-offs of LEAN (or lean) manufacturing and supply chains. There are certainly differences between physical and digital systems but queues/buffering and throughput all governed by Little's Law are impossible to escape.

If you want to reduce stress in your life, be a present and intentional person and all that. You will need margin. That can either be time that is not spoken for or activities planned that are fungible, the crumple-zones that you can comfortably give up when the surrounding world requires more of you.

The same goes for computer systems. If your system is operating at the maximum your hardware or infrastructure can manage it will completely fall over if hit by an outlier. You need to be able to handle that and typically you need some headroom even if you are "auto-scaling".

I think we all fall victim to the idea that we will arrive at a point where things are in balance and operating optimally or at least according to plan and spec. The arrival fallacy is strong in both personal lives and tech companies. It is argued against if you admit that all our system are at some level, often the human level, complex systems and that complex systems operate in degraded mode.

This night my 2-year old managed to make the bed quite wet and I had to deal with that in the middle of the night. I did not get the night of sleep I would have optimally wanted. I'm not broken but I'm somewhat degraded.

Fortunately I don't have a full day planned with tight beginning and end. I also went to bed a bit earlier than I would have liked. Crumple zones for a known problem area. I'd love to fill my evenings with entertainment or writing and get up early in the morning to do exercise. But that would require things to be operating optimally which I know they won't right now. Truth be told, if I did try to they wouldn't crash.

They'd cascade onto my wife who would be an unwilling crumple zone for my poor capacity planning. Worth noting is she is also at any given day very likely to be operating below optimal. And if she buckled under that load we'd have a really, really bad day. 

You'll also see this in any architecture you build for a digital systems as well the organization of companies. You'll see the complexity of failures and the need for headroom, redundancies and handling of failures grow with the complexity of the system.

This to my eye is why quality always dies on the table of cost savings and efficiencies. Doing good work in a complex world requires headroom. Good companies get bought by private equity and they cut costs until the company is no longer good. Surface-level nothing has changed. Same products, same process, just less space to care at every turn. This becomes a danger of cutting anything to be too lean.

It is easier to maintain high quality and care in a simpler company. Easier to provide a great experience in a simple system. It is much more achievable to feel good in a life where you constrain how much you are trying to do at once. A tiny company is easier to keep on track, effective and fun.

There are things that cannot be achieved in simplicity. Complex organizations can exist with good reason. Some systems must be complex to achieve their purpose. And if that is to be done well, there must be care taken to leave a healthy margin.

Do you prefer to try and design the complex to degrade gracefully or do you thrive in simplicity? Let me know at lars@underjord.io or on Twitter where I'm @lawik.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I appreciate it.

- Lars Wikman