“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” — George Santayana

Today I was just passively listening to some random stuff about news, and I learned that there are certain media outlets that have been promoting a conspiracy theory about Taylor Swift.

Some conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift is some sort of left-wing-groomed victim of a sinister system. They’re practically begging her to remain out of politics.

This is curious for multiple reasons to me.

I love conspiracy theories! Come abduct me away all you space lizard meme overlords! Make me yours. 🦎🐊

One being that the way in which they’re acting implies that they are scared of her.

When I sit back and think, “Huh… so… what’s going on? This is interesting.”

I know nothing about Taylor Swift other than she has found herself with an immense amount of power and is now beginning to realize how she can assert it. I do know that…

This kind of power is scary to those who wish to remain in power. To retain power. Someone else taking that power is terrifying to them.

That leads me to believe that the attacks are fear driven. When that many people tell you to stay away from something then you know you’re pushing some sort of boundary that they’re worried about.

Whether it a parent be guiding a toddler, or an entire ideology telling you to back off, that kind of nannying is fear driven.

The other thing that’s interesting to me is the repetition and the sheer volume of propaganda that’s being generated. Millions upon millions upon millions of dollars are being poured into discrediting Taylor.

That is absolutely nuts.

And the repetition will eventually work. The actors behind this media-frenzy will eventually ignite a meme which will make an effort to quell their flock’s curiosity and compliance when it comes to someone with massive amounts of celebrity.

They are so fucking scared…

They’re making an effort to leverage the Streisand effect in order to nudge their voters to be opposition to the celebrity that has had such an emotional impact on their lives,.

That is just insane to me.

While there are no mysterious left-wing forces driving Taylor Swift’s decisions, it’s great if you think there are! I bet you live an interesting life and having a unique perspective of reality.

Repetition spawns familiarity.

And with familiarity…

Lots of things are possible.

Which brings me right into topics three, four, and five.

“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” — George Santayana

As a Staff Engineer, I’ve somehow found myself in many, many, “cross-organizational higher-level conversations.”

This is code for working with people in groups other than yours to plan how you’re gonna figure out how to plan things so that you can ensure stakeholders are more aware of what kind of progress is being made in whatever domain they’re associated with.

A lot of these kind of conversations can be sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo boooooooooooooooooooooooring. Like if I decided to go off camera, and I was laying with my laptop in bed, I would fall asleep boring.

But.

It is very important that I attend and pay just a little attention to what’s being communicated. And being available to answer questions when they arise. To listen for little words that tickle the theoretical area of speciality in the back of my mind.

That’s my job.

To listen for keywords.

Which is a ludicrously vast over-simplification of what that actually means.

It’s kinda like becoming an expert at speaking ancient Greek. It may be very easy to you to listen and look for the important words that have you feeling you know how to interpret whatever communication. Whatever discussion. Whatever group activity.

You can quickly get the context, meaning, impact, and all that crap about what’s being discussed… but you need to pay attention for the things that you’re thought to know about.

And to know about what’s actually being said.

What’s actually known.

What’s actually wanted.

Having the history of knowing what to ask, and where to go, to get information that may be vital to be considered.

And then direct attention to important details. Or asking, answering, and demonstrating the value in some of the questions that may make or break the success of some very complicated projects. That may make or break the morale of a team.

Which can be challenging when someone asks you a question and you are literally not thinking about what they’re talking about at all. My strategy is to just fess up, laugh about it, shrug it off, and ask them to repeat the question. YMMV.

So I’m in these meetings where we’re planning how to plan for projects. And sometimes we have discussions about the plans to create the plans.

It can get kinda meta at times.

So I gotta know what questions we’re gonna have to ask. What information we need to acquire and consider. What kind of time estimates people are desiring — which are quite often not 100% grounded in the reality of history and the now.

An unfortunate detail that pretty much most people overlook is how a lack of acknowledgement of how past projects have been executed is a recipe for having the same kind of shit happen. Not a disaster. Just the same shit.

Much like children inherit the pattern of their parents, organizations inherit the working agreements and progresses from their leaders.

This seems to be a pretty bitter pill to a lot of people when the projects they’re advocating for tank… or otherwise go in some absolutely unplanned direction than they were expecting.

Anyway.

I’m role playing as some actor that’s meant to know how to lead a migration from CentOS 7 to Amazon Linux 2023.

That’s a smooth, easy, absolutely-nothing-can-go-wrong, kind of thing to do.

It’s just a Linux to Linux upgrade, right?

Well… It’s complicated. And, yes. The basic platform is Linux. And the basic package management technology is the same… but the fundamental software, and of web of dependencies involve, is so different that even though CentOS 7 and Amazon Linux 2023 are related to each other, they differ in many ways that may serve as rude gotchas because of a deviation from the CentOS/RHEL ecosystem by the Amazon Linux crew.

This is a major Operating System ​migration​. The reason this is a major migration is because of how the platform is currently built. It’s built like platforms get built.

One brick at a time.

The problem is that if no one is paying attention to the bricks then things get complicated. Components crumble and need to be patched with whatever can be used around them to patch the problem.

And these little things add up in “enterprise” ecosystems.

Attrition can do some incredible damage to an organization’s ability to remain efficient. It’s unfortunate when folks don’t really consider that.

At home, in my lab, a migration from CentOS 7 to Amazon Linux 2023 is easy. Peasy. Lemon breezy.

And by lab, I mean imagination. Of course. The original containerization.

But performing a migration with a fleet of over 2,000 virtual machines — which are basically computers in computers — presents a wide gamut of fuck-my-life kind of life and career challenges.

Unfortunately for me, unless people have experience with this kind of not even at scale-scale, then there may be the perception that something as simple as an OS upgrade will be quick and easy.

It is not.

Sometimes the easiest way to share the complexity of a system is to expose the system itself. To call attention to how it’s working, what it’s done, what it wants to do, and more.

And sometimes the easiest way to express a complex topic is through the power of metaphor.

I’ve never met a four that’s not after a three.

The previous Operating System migration took 8 years due to the loss of information and context over the years through attrition. All of the information is here. The manual is here.

But this shit is so complicated that sometimes knowing where to begin in itself is a challenge.

The metaphor that popped into my head recently, like corn, is that we’re currently flying ​in a 737​.

The engineering team that designed it no longer have the principal engineers responsible for designing the actual core jet features. It’s infrastructure. The nitty gritty of the “why’s” that drove the “what” that was realized by the “who.”

Those folks are all gone, and now we are required to modernize this jet while flying it in the air. And there are so many details that, while may be written down, are unknown by newer engineers. And there are so many that oftentimes they’re known by many of the seniors as well.

Knowing where the information is, and what the information was, that contributed to the success or the failure of an outcome has value. It allows you to “read the tea leaves” within the contexts of parts of the projects that may be similar to previous ones.

For now. Pretty sure AI will do this shit better than me. Pretty sure.

These lost, and overlooked, little details are very important though. They will impact the structural integrity of the jet. Details such as the nuts and bolts and where they all go. How tight they need to be. All that stuff about torque and stuff.

And making sure they’re sourced from ethical, reliable, vendors with premium material, of course!

Then question that I feel is important that we need to ask ourselves when planning the migration to Amazon Linux 2023, and cloud-native refactoring, is this:

How are we going to ensure the bolts are tight when we don’t know what needs to be tightened on a jet that has about 1.5 million screws.

According to Google.

The sky diving part is that I’ve been having to figure out how to convey this information to directors and executives and architects and more. So I kinda just gotta call shit out, bring attention to, and request information about, the kind of details that some people may be disinterested in acknowledging.

It’s risky to ask someone a question that they really don’t want to answer.

Very risky.

Sky diving.

From an in-flight jet.

And then I’ve been proceeding to scour through years and years of over 30,000 tickets to find the information to support my claim. Linking each of content to whatever ticket I’ve been working from.

A ticket being a unit of work.

I’ve linked like 80 tickets to the parent ticket that contains all the information about the work that needs to be considered.

And there are more to link to, and more information to discover.

I guess that’s why they call it discovery.