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Big Ideas

Here you'll find some of the biggest influences on Mender.AI's philosophy. Find something that strikes your fancy and enjoy!

The Innovation Delusion​

The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession With The New Has Disrupted The Work That Matters Most by Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell (Book | Talk)

Drawing on years of original research and reporting, The Innovation Delusion shows how the ideology of change for its own sake has proved a disaster. Corporations have spent millions hiring chief innovation officers while their core businesses tank. Computer science programs have drilled their students on programming and design, even though the overwhelming majority of jobs are in IT and maintenance. In countless cities, suburban sprawl has left local governments with loads of deferred repairs that they can’t afford to fix. And sometimes innovation even kills—like in 2018 when a Miami bridge hailed for its innovative design collapsed onto a highway and killed six people.

In this provocative, deeply researched book, Vinsel and Russell tell the story of how we devalued the work that underpins modern life—and, in doing so, wrecked our economy and public infrastructure while lining the pockets of consultants who combine the ego of Silicon Valley with the worst of Wall Street’s greed. The authors offer a compelling plan for how we can shift our focus away from the pursuit of growth at all costs, and back toward neglected activities like maintenance, care, and upkeep.

Ironies of Automation​

This 1983 paper by Lisanne Bainbridge is shockingly relevant 40 years later.

A naive approach to automation eliminates easy tasks while making the hard tasks even harder!

The important ironies of the classical approach to automation lie in the expectations of system designers, and in the nature of the tasks left for the human operators to carry out. The designer's view of the human operator may be that the operator is unreliable and inefficient, so should be eliminated from the system. There are two ironies with that attitude. One is that designer errors can be a major source of operating problems. [...] The second irony is that the designer who tries to eliminate the operator still leaves the operator to do the tasks which the operator cannot think how to automate. It is this approach which causes the problems to be discussed here, as it means that the operator can be left with an arbitrary collection of tasks, and little thought may have been given to providing support for them.

The Mythical Man-Month​

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Fred Brooks (Book | Video by Computerphile)

Kill It With Fire​

Kill It With Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones) by Marianne Bellotti (Book | Talk)

"Kill it with fire," the typical first reaction to a legacy system falling into obsolescence, is a knee-jerk approach that often burns through tons of money and time only to result in a less efficient solution. This book offers a far more forgiving modernization framework, laying out smart value-add strategies and proven techniques that work equally well for ancient systems and brand-new ones. Renowned for restoring some of the world’s oldest, messiest computer networks to operational excellence, software engineering expert Marianne Bellotti distills key lessons and insights from her experience into practical, research-backed guidance to help you determine when and how to modernize. With witty, engaging prose, Bellotti explains why new doesn’t always mean better, weaving in illuminating case studies and anecdotes from her work in the field.

Theory of Constraints​

The Goal by Eli Goldratt (Book | Summary)

Theory of Constraints (TOC) is a management paradigm emphasizing cause-and-effect logic and Systems Thinking. First introduced in Eli Goldratt's 1984 novel The Goal, it has since shown effectiveness in many industries, even forming the basis for Gene Kim's DevOps novel The Phoenix Project (2015).

TOC is commonly used as a focusing method, exposing the areas where local changes will have the highest global impact. In this way, it can be combined with improvement programs from other methodologies like Lean and SixSigma.

A chain can only be strengthened at its weakest link; strengthening any other link has no effect other than to waste resources and make the chain heavier. Similarly, TOC holds that for every system (or flow of value) there is just one factor limiting us from higher performance. This factor is called the constraint.

Joint Cognitive Systems​

Joint Cognitive Systems: Patterns in Cognitive Systems Engineering by David Woods and Erik Hollnagel (Book| Chapter 1 PDF)

Nothing has been more prolific over the past century than human/machine interaction. Automobiles, telephones, computers, manufacturing machines, robots, office equipment, machines large and small; all affect the very essence of our daily lives. However, this interaction has not always been efficient or easy and has at times turned fairly hazardous. Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE) seeks to improve this situation by the careful study of human/machine interaction as the meaningful behavior of a unified system.