How to be a Failure
summary
Describes automating a VMware certificate rollout with a PowerShell script across thousands of ESXi hosts and multiple vCenters that appears to “fail” only because the management client isn’t refreshing, not because workloads die; cites the AWS S3 brownout where a routine maintenance command removed too many nodes; explains cortisol vs dopamine effects, recommends measuring impact radius, adding visibility, using resilience patterns and practicing chaos engineering to build safer systems, plus PowerShell automation and blameless postmortems as concrete tools.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:05Acknowledging failure
- 3:54Certificate upgrade disaster
- 6:23How failure affects us
- 10:10Failure in high-stakes systems
- 11:54Blame vs system failure
- 15:05Controlling failure impact
- 19:56Building resilient systems
- 21:18Impact radius of mistakes
- 23:04Failure as a teacher
- 24:51Leading through failure
- 26:17Tom’s high-stakes success
- 29:04Staying motivated after failure
- 30:07Making failure positive
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