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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.
> 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.
For that matter, sysops should not call themselves engineers unless they actually are.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Eh, you're in danger of being tarred with the dinosaur brush yourself unless you recognize that mainframes at JPL died 30 years ago and the systema being replaced are probably Oracle Applications and Microsoft Exchange.
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.
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.
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.
And I didn't mean to denigrate your main point, however your point would be stronger if stated accurately without hyperbole.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
"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 remind somebody of the new policy :)
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Heres one for you pal:
http://professionalsuperhero.c...
Who's Brin and Gates? Well since you apparently can't use Wikipedia Brin studied comp sci and maths.
Gates spent most of his formative years coding and devising algorithms.
"This thread is one for the wall."
If thats the idiot A/C wall then yeah, you're right up there with the best my friend. Its rather tell you posted entirely as A/C so no one can look up your moronic drivel in years to come.