Garry Shutler

Don’t recommend watch Severence S2E7 followed by the Black Mirror S7 trailer.

Epic, but I think I need a hug now 😅

There are 2 environments:
testing and ✨spicy testing✨. Some people erroneously call ✨spicy testing✨ "prod"

And all turning 55!

Hans Gruber falling from Nakatomi Plaza at the end of Die Hard

Merry Christmas!

John McClane has acquired a machine gun.

Ho ho ho.

Less incidents and improved time to resolution when they do happen.

The corporate equivalent of using a child’s full name as a parent.

We’ve all been there 😤

Code: better !pout !cry better watchout lpr why santa claus < north pole >town cat /etc/passwd >list ncheck list ncheck list cat list | grep naughty >nogiftlist cat list | grep nice >giftlist santa claus < north pole >town who | grep sleeping who | grep awake who | egrep 'bad|good' for (goodness sake) { be good }

Hackmas season is here 🎄🎅🤶🎁

(Frank Carey of Bell Labs, 1985)

The date 24th December 2017 arranged in ISO 8601 format and made out of pitted dates on a table.

I always prefer my dates in ISO 8601 format...

#ProgrammerPunvent

I’ve always assumed those Santa tracker web sites must use SQL behind the scenes because searching requires a “where Claus?”...

#ProgrammerPunvent

Egoless Engineering It turns out misery is a shitty proxy metric.

Hello, I wrote a new talk that is ultimately about how misery is a dumb strategy

egoless.engineering

Photo of Rick Astley’s autobiography “Never” on a shop shelf.

Part 1 of 5 I assume.

"For each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change"

@kentbeck.bsky.social September, 2012

Standing the test of time.

I learned this week there’s a word for that! bsky.app/profile/susi...

I got chiles
They’re multiplying

Refusing to create the link may have been the more correct action from an academic point of view. However, creating a link put the workflow in a state that is more recoverable, making it the better choice.

Someone not being presented any options is a known path, eg. sometimes people's schedules are full, that systems and humans have ways to handle.

Terminating the chain by refusing to create a link would be much harder for the adjacent systems and humans to recover from.

This came to light as we worked through an edge in a scheduling workflow.

We could be asked to create a scheduling link which it was impossible to satisfy, and so we had a choice to make: refuse to create the link, or create a link that would never present any options.

When you form part of a chain, if you refuse to move forward then the whole workflow may be broken.

Instead of refusing to play your part, it may be better to respond with an action that later parts in the chain are then aware of and can handle appropriately.

When joining systems together you have to think about the failure cases.

I don't often agree with Postel's law. When providing an API, the best response to invalid input is usually to reject the request.

However, if you're an actor within a workflow, that might not be the best path. 🧵

Looking back, one of the best investments we made at @incident.io was the work we did to bake-in good observability from the start.

I don't get to work in the code anymore but our tracing setup was such a superpower for understanding what was happening in the system.

incident.io/blog/observa...

It wasn't from the start for us, but agree on it being a superpower.

I wrote about the motivation for it nearly 4 years ago 👴

gshutler.com/2020/12/movi...

I should probably write about how our practices today are influenced by the presence of the rich observability we have!

What if I want to create a shrubbery?

A woodcut of a bird beside the text "take some responsibility for your bullshit"

It's DNS until proven otherwise. The spookiest of infra.

Now we know what the budget actually contained...

As a working person my tax burden is virtually unchanged!

As a business owner the goal is to pay as much CGT as possible at whatever the rate may be at that point in the future 🤘

Death to DST, the UK should adopt GMT year-around.

gshutler.com/2024/10/deat...