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[stanislaw]

• Centralized vs federated.
• When sequencing tasks (possibly repetitive), group tasks that are related to each other and split them from other tasks. E.g. writing a requirements document, split the task of collecting Inbox items for the task of allocating requirements to sections. Or extracting from a non-trivial branch the trivial changes as separate Pull Requests and merging them separately.
• The cost of abstraction
  • Abstraction as a gadget that one has to mentally install. Difficulties of installing abstractions.
  • Over-engineering with wrong abstractions.
  • Examples: State machines
• Struggle for survival
• Too many lessons learned paralysis.
  • The development still happens because something has to be built.
  • New companies cannot implement all lessons learned at the same time.

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• Doing less work / busy work. The best code is code that is not written. Engineering is sometimes cheating.
• A combination of quick-and-dirty scripts that creates miracles. Add after "Quick exploration".
• Cloning or re-implementing an existing solution is easier than creating a new one.
• Estimates and intuition. Developers just don't know when they estimate but they may not tell.
• Managers are your friends.
• Top-down systems engineering. Single entry point to every topic as anchor. One page per topic.

Top down system engineering is critical for engineering safety into complex systems (MIT ESW)

• Systems engineering activity consists of computation tasks. SysEngineer acts like IO device.
• Making decisions in hard situations. Saying NO or YES.
• Inherently messy.
• Encyclopedism/esoterism as anti-pattern.
• Newcomers vs aftercomers (maintenance programmers).
• In the beginning there was cash.
• Open positions are not emerging by themselves. Driven by some pain.
• Before something can scale, it must exist.
• Transformation of unknown to boring
• Bad design -> No longer adequate
• The systems are not based on perfect design.
• Effective learning is a result of computation.
• Order (wires and clothes)
• Maintenance Trade-offs
• Research teams vs execution teams
• If a process is done once or rarely, it will likely be slow and full of mistakes or issues.
• Seek for an opportunity to automate processes or tasks.
• An example about air traffic: the whole is more important than the interests of individual participants

Documentation

• Documentation is a garden.
• Hierarchy, composition, zooming helps in chunking information
• Redundancy in text: strengthens the common understanding / helps finding errors. This is an exception to the Single Source of Truth principle.

Diagrams

• I/O model
• Control/Feedback diagram
• Static diagram