Recently, I had two experiences within a few days that made me think regarding system dependability. In both situations, the systems acted detached from their surrounding reality and thus became confusing or even annoying – even if it would have been easy for them to detect their reality detachment.
About a decade ago, Jeffrey Dean and Luiz AndrĂ© Barroso published their IMO great article “The tail at scale” in the Communications of the ACM . The article dives into the topic of latency tail-tolerance.
In the previous post, we identified time as our most precious resource. We saw that we are always confronted with a lot of tasks and expectations of other people. We also discussed that quite some of them turn out not to have any value for us or other people we care about. I call such tasks time killers.