Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

November 9, 2017

Flight rules for git – How to Distinguish Between Astronauts and Programmers

Filed under: Documentation,Git,Programming — Patrick Durusau @ 7:54 pm

Flight rules for git by Kate Hudson.

From the post:

What are “flight rules”?

A guide for astronauts (now, programmers using git) about what to do when things go wrong.

Flight Rules are the hard-earned body of knowledge recorded in manuals that list, step-by-step, what to do if X occurs, and why. Essentially, they are extremely detailed, scenario-specific standard operating procedures. […]

NASA has been capturing our missteps, disasters and solutions since the early 1960s, when Mercury-era ground teams first started gathering “lessons learned” into a compendium that now lists thousands of problematic situations, from engine failure to busted hatch handles to computer glitches, and their solutions.

— Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life.

Hudson devises an easy test to distinguish between astronauts and programmers:

Astronauts – missteps, disasters and solutions are written down.

Programmers – missteps, disasters and solutions are programmer/sysadmin lore.

With Usenet and Stackover, you can argue improvement by programmers but it’s hardly been systematic. Even so it depends on a “good” query returning few enough “hits” to be useful.

Hudson is capturing “flight rules” for git.

Act like an astronaut and write down your missteps, disasters and solutions.

NASA made it to the moon and beyond by writing things down.

Who knows?

Writing down software missteps, disasters and solutions may help render all systems transparent, willingly or not.

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