SRE Weekly Issue #164

I previously shared an article about the 737 MAX 8, and I’m truly saddened that another accident has occurred. Learning from accidents like this is incredibly important, and the NTSB is among the best at it. I look forward to see what we can take away from this to make air travel even safer.

Farnoush Amiri and Ben Kesslen — NBC

The existence of this anonymous channel for pilots is really interesting to me. It sounds like a great way to learn about near misses, which can be nearly identical to catastrophic accidents. Can we implement this kind of anonymous channel in our organizations too?

Thom Patterson and Aaron Cooper — CNN

“Aviation accidents are rarely the result of a single cause,” Lewis noted. “There are often many small things that lead to a crash, and that’s why these investigations take so long.”

Francesca Paris — NPR

Google and other companies are working on their own private undersea cables.

‘People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not. It’s in the ocean.’

Adam Satariano — New York Times

For this week, I have an article about on-call and how its done at NASA. Many of the conclusions here may not be that surprising to those who have been on-call for any length of time, but I think there is a lot to learn from how NASA makes the system work.

Thai Wood — Resilience Roundup (summary)

Emily S Patterson and David D Woods — Ohio State University (original article)

I hadn’t thought of this before, but I really like this idea:

The facilitator’s role in the meeting is different from the other participants. They do not voice their own ideas, but keep the discussion on track and encourage the group to speak up.

Rachael Byrne — PagerDuty