Chaos reigns
In these previews days, I learned about the importance of validating the things we calculate or develop with nature. An approach to validate this in the tech industry is front your work with the chaos development by a chaos engineer. The first thing that attached to my head when I learned that the “Chaos engineer” job existed was the scene of the fox in the Lars Von Trier movie “Antichrist”.
In this scene, a semi-carcass fox in the middle of the high grass says the words “Chaos reigns” meanwhile a brilliant Willem Dafoe gets freeze.
This scene was very shocking for me when I saw the movie, but I must admit that the idea of chaos as a ruler in the universe is attached to my brain since then.
And nothing is more true than this since chaos is the natural order of things, there is even a measure in science called “entropy” which quantifies the number of equivalent microstates for a macrostate of a system, that is, it contemplates the probability that happens a state whose parts include small more specific states, in other words, contemplates and quantifies the probability of things and always has that the disorder has a greater probability of happening.
The above is extremely important when looking for validation in production since if you want to be prepared against any problem out there, the best thing you can do is hire a chaos engineer, a person dedicated to releasing code versions of a bunch of angry monkeys who are going to try to break everything, attack the system that you have created in a thousand ways and put without a doubt all the methods that you have built to defend yourself on test and find out if your code is strong enough to deal with the real-world chaos.
Throughout my life I have met many people, some very smart, others whose sole purpose seems to be to annoy others by mentioning only a couple of characteristics; Without a doubt, the least frequent combination but not for that reason less real is the one that combines the two characteristics described above, and that is, that someone has an incredible cognitive capacity and uses it to break something in very creative ways. A chaos engineer ideally needs just this combination of features to do a good job, that is, come up with unconventional ways to hurt the application or platform of their choice.
I realize that the technology industry is so large and diverse that even people who would be considered harmful elsewhere have a prominent place in today’s software development and are well paid for their work.
All of the above brings me to the next point in terms of things that I learned and that is that this week I saw some videos of the great theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, a character with enviable intellectual capacities who was also quite a pleasant being who knew how to condense knowledge difficult to explain into short and understandable stories for the bulk of the population for which he was quite loved by everyone who got to know him, and of course, Feynman was not only smart but also creative, he liked to do many things in addition to those that are typically linked to his work, he used to play the bongos and visit certain places of nightlife, all this made him have much more contact with the world in which the regular citizen lives than a common theoretical physicist is accustomed to, and Feynmann took advantage of that.
This has made me think that it is okay for people to be outside of what we believe is the typical path or the standard accustomed to a profession or work since the fact that they do not fully conform to prejudice will cause them not to behave in a way expected and that is fine since when this person faces a problem within their profession they may think differently when developing a solution and at the end that is what any person is looking for, be it physical or not, occupy the scientific method or not, find a solution to a problem.
In the end, I stay with that, you always have to look for solutions and the more creative they are, the better.
