Could our mistakes be as important to technological development as our ideas?

No matter the layers in your stack there’s one inevitability about all of our systems: errors. Misunderstandings, miscalculations, and mishaps are so much a part of the human experience, they can’t help but get baked into the increasingly complex socio-technical systems that we create. Historically we’ve always aimed to reduce our bug counts or have fewer incidents, but what if we instead, thought of these errors as opportunities to better refine our understandings of how our systems interact with the world around them? Maybe, in fact, our mistakes are at least as important to technological development as our innovative ideas?

In this fascinating episode of Traceroute, we start back in 1968, when “The Mother of All Demos” was supposed to change the face of personal computing…before the errors started. We’re then joined by Andrew Clay Shafer, a DevOps pioneer who has seen the evolution of “errors” to “incidents” through practices like Scrum, Agile, and Chaos Engineering. We also speak with Courtney Nash, a Cognitive Neuroscientist and Researcher whose Verica Open Incident Directory (VOID) has changed the way we look at incident reporting.