This is a tale of finding fractals in an unexpected place and why the appearance makes sense in hindsight. I was looking for patterns in valid board game configurations, specifically the middle contesting row in the Game of Ur. In the game, there are eight slots either of the two players may occupy, but a slot may only be occupied by at most one player.
How to Solve It, but for operational incidents. Engineers with site reliability responsibilities are often faced with operational issues (incidents) that have an unknown cause and uncertain solution. How to Solve It is a classic work describing heuristics for solving mathematical problems. There have been adaptations of this book for different domains, but none yet for software-intensive operations.
Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons by Jon Peterson
Game Wizards is a business history spanning the creation of Dungeons & Dragons and TSR to the firing of Gary Gygax in 1985. The book has a special focus on the legal battles between Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson around creator and royalty rights for D&D, but also covers the rivalry between GenCon and Origin and the overall growth of TSR. Jon Peterson assembles the story from a broad-range of sources, including media portrayals, fanzines, interviews, legal documents, unexpected artifacts, and recreations of financial statements.
Warning: Contains spoilers for the season 6, episode 5 “Tethics” of the show Silicon Valley which aired in 2019.
In “Tethics”, two managers of Pied Piper, Gilfoyle and Monica, are threatened by HR due to their low employee engagement scores — there’s a consensus among the employees that the two managers are jerks. They both promise to raise their scores, but stupidly promise to raise the scores from “hate” to “love” within a week. Faced with this impossible task, they hatch a plan to use social engineering to steal employee’s passwords and then, using the compromised employee’s accounts, modify the engagement scores to show that employees now love them. How realistic is this plan? How can we mitigate these kinds of attacks? Let’s use a threat modeling approach to answer both.