Comment by ianmcgowan 3 months ago
There's a story in the book - on nuclear submarines there's a brass bar in front of all the dials and knobs, and the engineers are trained to "grab the bar" when something goes wrong rather than jumping right to twiddling knobs to see what happens.
A weird, yet effective recommendation from someone at my last job: If it's a destructive or dangerous action in prod, touch both your elbows first. This forces ou to take the hands away from the keyboard, stop any possible auto-pilot and look what you're doing.
Related: write down what you're seeing (or rather, what you _think_ you're seeing), and so with pen and paper, not the keyboard. You can type way faster than you can write, and the slowness of writing makes you think harder about what you think you know. Often you do the know the answer, you just have to tease it out. Or there are gaps in your knowledge that you hadn't clocked. After all, an assumption is something you don't realise you've made.
This also works well in conjunction with debug tooling -- the tooling gives you the raw information, writing down that information helps join the dots.
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling
Yes! I do this when doing anything destructive ("rm -rf dir", "drop db", etc.) - i just stop and say out loud what environment I'm in, what the command I'm running is going to do and why I am doing it. This is in a remote-work situation, in an office I would have someone come double check the really destructive things before hitting enter..
I have to sit on my hands at the dentist to prevent impulse moves.
I read this book and took this advice to heart. I don't have a brass bar in the office, but when I'm about to push a button that could cause destructive changes, especially in prod, my hands reflexively fly up into the air while I double-check everything.