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"Chaotic Architecture" At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
New submitter CarlaRudder writes: NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) is ditching old, rigid, legacy tools and adopting a much more flexible approach that allows people within the company to pick and choose the technologies that help them do their jobs better. CIO Jim Rinaldi and IT Chief Technology Officer Tom Soderstrom are calling it "chaotic architecture," and they are using it to better prepare for change and to attract the next generation of IT talent to JPL.
They probably just signed a contract with Jebediah Kerman's Junkyard and Spaceship Parts Co.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
What the Mechanical Engineering world badly needs is an open Parameteric CAD Standard. Right now it's horrible. Each company uses it's own proprietary file that cannot be easily shared with other software. There are some portable formats but you basically give up all of the engineering data. A CAD file should be an engineering document not just a model of what the perfect part should be. It should contain all of the important parametric data and the tolerances, GTOL's, surface finishes, fabrication notes, etc. It is amazing that this still doesn't exist and the costs of dealing with it are astronomical.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
A few things I have learned from 20 years in IT:
1) On every project, (individual) people have been the critical success factor, not process.
2) While you will always need process, process is not a replacement for good people. Most common IT processes attempt to ensure that errors made by poor performers are caught, but they also ensure that your best people will not be operating at peak performance. This is sometimes called "predictable mediocrity"
This Chaotic Architecture thing sounds like a step in the right direction... putting trust (with oversight) in people rather than an ivory tower dictating company-wide policies. The real trick is how to organize that oversight without ending up with the same dictatorship by corporate architects. This requires effective management at all levels; daring to delegate and trust rather than dictate... but I've noticed a bad shortage of such Leaders in the places I've worked the last few years.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It's one thing to allow IT and devs to choose their own tools, but how are they going to ensure that the chosen tools are actually any good? For example a few years back Ruby on Rails and NoSQL were all the rage. The hype was intense, and a lot of CIOs and managers bought into it without actually thinking it through. The problem is that Rails and NoSQL were pushed by many Rubyists who, well, didn't have a fucking clue as to what they were doing! If you thought Java software from the early 2000s was bad, the shit the Rubyists made was so much worse. A lot of the Rails and NoSQL projects from that era were total disasters, worse than anything we'd seen before. So how will JPL defend themselves from remarkably bad developers and the extraordinarily awful tools that these remarkably bad developers like to use?
Anyone who has ever worked or spent much time at JPL knows that the real architecture is chaotic too - a maze of buildings built over decades, and (like MIT) described only by arbitrary numbers.
the thought that someone might be using grunt at NASA
Seriously? Because that's how the rest of us have been doing it for at least decade or so now. How does some dinosaur CIO thinking that our new-fanged "interpreted languages" and "distributed version control" are less organized than his precious mainframe programmed in assembly with a bit of C here and there make news? Oh ya, I forgot, this is slashdot.
Disclaimer: No, of course I didn't RTFA.
Maybe they should stop demanding the medical records of all their employees for the witch hunt de jour.
From TFA, 'Years ago we tried "enterprise architecture" here at JPL, and no one was really resonating with that.'
Sounds like they had the typical thing happen: an IT architect pretended to be an enterprise architect and screwed everything up. Something like 2/3 of EA practices fail for that reason. Some IT architect oversees a project for a big server application that talks to a few other systems then starts trying to claim the title Enterprise Architect. But it's like somebody claiming to be building architect because they put in the plumbing and air con.
I really wish IT people would stop trying to steal the job title of Enterprise Architect. All it leads to is people thinking that EA is shit because a bunch of fucktards from IT haven't a clue what EA involves. They've screwed things up badly for real EAs.
Frankly, if IT people want to steal job titles, they can fuck off, build a web server and start claiming to be from Marketing.
> that allows people within the company
JPL is a NASA center managed by CalTech. Neither is a company.
Quick summary: we stay the fuck out of the way of the engineers so they can install and use the tools they prefer in the way they want.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
n/t
Have gnu, will travel.
Chaotic Architecture, brought to you by NASA. The organization where one team uses metric and the other English units of measure.
That's because the Republicans that rule us are so stupid.
Funny you should say that since all the JPL buildings were designed by Hillary as a last-ditch fortress for her and Bill to hold of the feds in the case that anyone actually figured out what they have done.
Apparently they are also ditching old, rigid, legacy telemetry data from the Apollo missions. They "lost" the tapes. All 14,000 of them!
NASA is a bunch of liars. Slashdot's fortune is apt: "The trouble with a lot of self-made men is that they worship their creator."
Certainly, not the creator of the firmament that the shuttle is (possibly) designed to penetrate.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory is administered and property of the California Institute of Technology.
NASA is a customer of CIT and JPL!
Butt Fuckers
Those arbitrary numbers were assigned in the order that Congress approved the construction of the buildings (allocated across all NASA centers, intermittently). So buildings with close numbers (e.g. 300,301, 303) were all built about the same time and show it . Higher numbers are always newer than older numbers. Bldg 103 is slightly newer than bldg 67 (that's one of the original bldgs at the lab, although it had a second floor added at some point).
But, as you say, totally haphazard arrangement. Hey, it's on the side of a hill, so that drives things too. You have to fit new buildings in where there's a hole.
The push to open source to lower costs really threw productivity down the cliff...
That theory would seem to conflict with what the JPL guys said, but don't let me stop your frothing, Coward.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Fractal architectures are born simply by repeating the small set of principles at different scales. So a chaotic architecture must be a system in a plane of complex acquisition rules, pushed one bipartisan rule beyond repair and salvation.
"Enterprise Architect". Just another feel good title for some idiot who wouldn't feel so important if he was called Facilities Manager. And what the fuck exactly do those people know about computer system architecture? Answer: Nothing. Stay out of IT decisions and stick to signing the cheques.
Maybe if you read this cartoon you'll understand my previous post a bit better. And maybe you should have a think about who Brin and Gates are. Thanks for proving my original point so well. This thread is one for the wall.
Here on campus we have a building the architect designed such that, to get to any particular room (the building is like three separate buildings with ramps and skyways and basements), you'll need to talk to three different people. It was to facilitate community. We call it the Death Star and it indeed would be much more navigable with a grappling hook and light saber.