Chaos Human

With the unofficial start of summer here in the United States, I have a modest proposal can allow you to improve your organizations robustness. It does not require any big changes to your company, in fact you already have to authorization to implement it.
Netflix has had great success in improving the ability to recover from a failed process. Their approach was simple, they randomly kill processes in production. This Chaos Monkey process has been such a success that it has spawned an entire Simian Army of processes. One of them is Chaos Guerrilla which takes down all of the Netflix processes on a given data center.
The crazy idea of attacking your own code in production is part of a DevOps philosophy of increasing the occurrence of painful events in order to find a way to make them less painful.

So what does this have you Chaos Human and summer? One of the most painful occurrences of an organization is the sudden loss of a key staff member. I encourage you to put your organization through the pain of losing you by taking a vacation. You already have vacation time to take, if you are like most IT professionals, you generally do not take it all.

So take a vacation, not just a long weekend, you should disappear for at least a week. No phones calls answered, no emails read. If possible go somewhere where your phone does not work. It is a heavy burden that I ask you to take on, but you owe it to your organization to do it.

Have a nice summer.