Day 25 - Learning from Other Industries

This was written by Jordan Sissel (semicomplete.com).

This post is late because, two days ago (December 24th), I went to the emergency room with appendicitis. Pretty sweet timing, eh?

After surgery, I was bored and took to observing nursing shift rotations - hand-offs of patients, documentation maintenance, etc. The entire process semeed to last about an hour for each shift change. I thought to myself, "Self, you have never been involved in any operations project, task, or fire hand-off that went as smoothly." Pretty sad realization.

Further, throughout my hospital stay (emergency room, surgery, and recovery), not once did I observe any two individuals debating passionately about how best to treat my illness. Data was available at every decision point. There were specializations in surgeons for the surgical tasks; nurses to help stabilize, comfort, and feed me (no small task); and administrative staff to handle the beaurocracy stuff.

I'm not expecting systems administration to follow exactly what the medical industry does, just pointing out that it's nice to see a well-orchestrated system in action.

And the best part? I never once heard anyone say, "hey! We should try this new cool thing I heard about."

Further, I never once heard anyone suggesting that we remove my appendix using node.js and mongodb.

Happy New Year, everyone :)

Further Reading

• Learning from NASA Engineering
• Nothing New Under the Sun
• Redundancy - Learning from the Airline Industry