Inklings: a tumblelog

I strongly believe that to understand systems, you must understand their pathologies–systems are most instructive when they fail. Unfortunately, we in computing systems do not have a strong history of studying pathology: despite the fact that failure in our domain can be every bit as expensive (if not more so) than in traditional engineering domains, our failures do not (usually) involve loss of life or physical property and there is thus little public demand for us to study them–and a tremendous industrial bias for us to forget them as much and as quickly as possible. The result is that our many failures go largely unstudied–and the rich veins of wisdom that these failures generate live on only in oral tradition passed down by the perps (occasionally) and the victims (more often).