The visible connector problem is easy to see in cabling. The software version is less visible, but it has the same maintenance shape. Zapier lists more than nine thousand apps it can connect to each other. Nine thousand pieces of software in regular business use that don’t talk to each other natively, and an entire company exists to be the translator between them. ...
A few weeks ago, recertifying my AWS Solutions Architect Professional cert for the second time, the course covered AWS Fault Injection Service, and it made me think about a company where the backups had been failing for a long time and nobody knew. The backups ran weekly to a server at a remote site, and the tapes were swapped by someone there whose job had nothing to do with infrastructure. Every swap the job had failed and the screen had shown a red line saying so, but the person doing the swapping had no reason to know red meant the backup had not worked. The job ran every week and the light was red every week. Nobody who could read the light was looking at it. ...
When McDonald’s replaced counter queues with big ordering screens, and Starbucks and Costa let you order through an app and just pick up, the reason those changes stuck was not only that the technology worked. It was that they were genuinely faster and easier than what they replaced, and most people who use them now would not go back. Some newer Starbucks locations have removed the counter entirely, which only makes sense if the replacement has already cleared that bar. COVID forced a lot of chains to get there properly because they had no choice but to get it right. ...
A P1 landed mid-morning with no context, the person who’d been handling it was off without a handover, and there were already several people on the call waiting for something to happen. The customer had been sitting with the issue for a while before we got involved, and what I had to work from was basically nothing. I started from scratch, kept it simple and worked up from there, and had it resolved within half an hour. The fix was something I’d documented two years earlier: Windows blocking files downloaded from the internet, unblocked via PowerShell, and I only found it because I’d written it down. ...