https://lyletagawa.com/ Recent content on hi Hugo -- gohugo.io en Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/squirrel-threat-model/ Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/squirrel-threat-model/ Squirrels have shut down Nasdaq trading twice. Beavers, cows, and sharks have taken down networks too, but misconfiguration, sabotage, and copper theft cause far more damage than any animal ever has. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/luck/ Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/luck/ Luck decides more than most are willing to admit. Hard work and grit determine how ready you are for it. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/hyrums-law/ Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/hyrums-law/ Hyrum’s Law says that with enough users, every observable behavior becomes a depended-upon feature. Your implementation details become your API contract, regardless of documentation or intent. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/functioning-as-designed/ Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/functioning-as-designed/ Traditional accident models assume every failure traces back to a broken part. STAMP treats safety as a control problem instead, which explains disasters where every component worked as designed. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/tcp-congestion-control/ Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/tcp-congestion-control/ In 1986, a network slowdown forced Van Jacobson to invent TCP congestion control. Reno, CUBIC, and BBR mark three different eras of solving that problem. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/bloom-filter/ Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/bloom-filter/ A Bloom filter checks whether something belongs to a set without storing the set. Firefox’s CRLite used one to compress revocation data for a billion certificates into 4 megabytes. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/t-digest/ Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/t-digest/ Your p99 latency might not be a percentile. Averaging percentiles across replicas produces a meaningless number, and t-digest is the sketch algorithm that fixes it at scale. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/how-llms-work/ Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/how-llms-work/ Working notes on how LLMs train and generate text. Probably mostly right, certainly incomplete. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/goodharts-law/ Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/goodharts-law/ Goodhart’s Law says every metric used to track progress eventually gets used to fake progress instead. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/distributed-causation/ Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/distributed-causation/ Distributed causation means complex failures have many causes spread across time, systems, and organizational boundaries. Fixing just one leaves the rest in place. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/influence-by-alignment/ Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/influence-by-alignment/ Alignment distributes decisions to whoever has the context. Authority centralizes them with whoever has the title, which is almost never the same person. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/live-event-caching/ Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/live-event-caching/ LRU caching evicts the segments live viewers need when they rewind. Netflix’s patent US 12,621,504 B2 fixes this with segment age and distributed ownership, without bloating every edge server. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/llm-context-biases/ Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/llm-context-biases/ Primacy bias, recency bias, sycophancy, and anchoring are predictable distortions in how LLMs weight information. Understanding them changes how you prompt, evaluate, and trust model outputs. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/jevons-paradox/ Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/jevons-paradox/ Why efficiency improvements in technology often increase total consumption rather than reduce it, and how leaders can anticipate and manage the inevitable rebound. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/ooda-loop/ Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/ooda-loop/ How John Boyd’s OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) applies to technology leadership, and practical strategies for eliminating the bottlenecks that slow your competitive cycles. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/robust-and-brittle/ Sun, 08 Jan 2023 15:07:19 -0500 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/robust-and-brittle/ Southwest Airlines has grown while desperately trying to be scrappy, creative and humorous. The challenge is that scrappy doesn’t scale well. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/pagerduty-summit-2020/ Thu, 24 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/pagerduty-summit-2020/ Learn how you can move faster and focus on the things that matter by using incident analysis as your secret weapon. Operating at speed and at scale tests the capabilities of even the most experienced engineering teams. In this software world, it is inevitable that things will break. When they do, what do you do? Pick up the pieces and carry on? What if that’s not enough? Learning from incidents has taught us that broken things can lead to powerful opportunities, but only when we’re looking at them through the right lens. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/resilient-management/ Mon, 17 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/resilient-management/ Think about your team for a moment. How well is it functioning? Are you currently on a high-performing team, having found your groove and flow state as a group? Are you on a team that isn’t quite in that magical state of being yet, but it feels like you’re on your way? Are you feeling some friction—frustration, confusion—with your team? Or have you just joined a new team, so none of these apply yet? https://lyletagawa.com/posts/manager-readme/ Tue, 14 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/manager-readme/ https://lyletagawa.com/posts/chaos-engineering/ Thu, 25 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/chaos-engineering/ Chaos Engineering builds confidence in distributed systems by deliberately introducing failures before they occur on their own. The discipline shifts teams from reactive incident response to proactive resilience building. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/team-topologies/ Thu, 14 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/team-topologies/ Team Topologies provides four fundamental team types – stream-aligned, platform, enabling, and complicated-subsystem – and three core team interaction modes – collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and facilitating. Together with awareness of Conway’s law, team cognitive load, and how to become a sensing organization, Team Topologies results in an effective and humanistic approach to building and running software systems. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/making-work-visible/ Fri, 08 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/making-work-visible/ We grumble that there just aren’t enough hours in the day and that someone else sure seems to have a lot of free time. But we regular mortals only have twenty-four hours in a day. The problem is that we don’t protect our hours from being stolen. We allow thieves to steal time from us, day after day after day. Who are these thieves of time? https://lyletagawa.com/posts/resilience/ Wed, 30 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/resilience/ Resilience Engineering is the framework for building systems that hold up when the unexpected is inevitable. Redundancy and rigorous testing still leave room for your system to fail anyway. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/remote-first/ Fri, 27 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/remote-first/ So how do we do remote work right? It takes much more than the half-hearted “you’re allowed to work from home” policy you see at companies nowadays. Remote-first means working remote is the default. It means making sure your remote employees are as much a part of the team as those in the office. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/turn-the-ship-around/ Mon, 05 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/turn-the-ship-around/ Concentrating decisions at the top discards the intelligence of people closest to the work. Marquet’s leader-leader model distributes authority to where information lives, producing organizations that outlast their leaders. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/the-dip/ Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/the-dip/ How do you avoid killing something too early, or celebrating too early. And last, how do you know when to kill a dud? https://lyletagawa.com/posts/just-culture/ Mon, 26 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/just-culture/ A just culture balances the need for an open and honest reporting environment with the end of a quality learning environment and culture. While the organization has a duty and responsibility to employees (and ultimately to patients), all employees are held responsible for the quality of their choices. Just culture requires a change in focus from errors and outcomes to system design and management of the behavioral choices of all employees. https://lyletagawa.com/posts/situation-behavior-impact/ Mon, 26 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/posts/situation-behavior-impact/ https://lyletagawa.com/about/ Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 https://lyletagawa.com/about/