This Inc Article on Elon Musk’s three rules for meetings is a must read. I say that as it is a spiritual companion philosophy to my own meeting rules where a meeting can only be one of three types: Distribute, Discuss, or Decide. Distribute – Usually a town-hall or informational update where the flow of information is one way and specifically topical. Discuss – We are there to deeply go through an issue, item, or effort. Its a time to get the variables on the table, options evaluated and interested parties engaged. Decide – This is not a Discussion. This is a formal, specific decision on something that has already had one or multiple discussions. \Mm

I recently read an interesting blog post by Marc Brooker who is an engineer at Amazon working on Lambda Services. The full post (found here) is worth a read and some real think time for your own environments. It discusses his four rules around when/how to identify if Redundancy actually assists availability. His rules are simply: The complexity added by introducing redundancy mustn’t cost more availability than it adds. The system must be able to run in degraded mode. The system must reliably detect which of the redundant components are healthy and which are unhealthy. The system must be able to return to fully redundant mode. Source: http://brooker.co.za/blog/2019/06/20/redundancy Some might read those and say “Of course. Common sense.” Except that …