Engineering and Improvising

I sent this in a weekly email to my company and thought I'd share here too! Hope you enjoy it, though it may sound very cliché.

The first weekend of October, I went to the Austin City Limits music festival and got to see Meghan Thee Stallion. I was so impressed by how she handled a difficult situation. She did not eat enough before and almost fainted halfway through her set. To pull through to the end, she improvised, pivoted, and brought on so many other people (including Miley Cyrus/Billie Eilish) to the stage in a comic fashion to keep the momentum up. It was definitely one of my favorite and most memorable sets of the weekend.

A few weeks earlier, I watched the show Mumbai Diaries: 11/26, Amazon's commendable attempt to re-tell the frightening terror attacks from Mumbai in 2008. However, this show was not just about the Palace Hotel - but instead told the story through the lens of Bombay General Hospital's trauma unit. Each episode showed how surgeons worked in the most dire of circumstances against all odds with whatever primitive tools they may have in their arsenal to keep patients alive. As I watched this show, I was reminded of Atul Gawande's book Complications which similarly brings up the kind of problem solving surgeons have to do on the fly.

A few weeks ago, our operations team had to deal with an issue with degraded system performance during midday production hours. They were required to improvise and problem solve:

• Capture problematic in-flight messages
• Investigate and patch inefficient design points
• Identify mechanisms to alleviate traffic flow from strained areas of the system

In some ways, we were doing surgery on our live production deployment!

All of these recent experiences showed me how stressful situations force us to improvise and become engineers. The best way to prepare is through practice, simulations, and drills. But sometimes that's a luxury, as we have to expect the unexpected. The best takeaway is to go deep into what you do, so you will know how to rise up to the occasion when needed. Most importantly, stay calm! Nothing feels better than emerging triumphant from these unexpected battles.