Pro-tip: Substack

I am a sucker for news and rarely manage to keep up with much, especially after having a child. However, I found a delightful blog Alana Murray's Substack.. (For us old timers, Substack is an interesting business model for modern journalism. Rather than subscribe to a brand, like Wired or the Atlantic, you can subscribe to individuals. It feels strange, but the world is changing.)

Here is a taste of one of her recent posts...

Most people who work in industrial controls recognize the patterns.

Configuration drift.

Fragmented architecture.

Undocumented changes piling up over years.

You’ve probably nodded along to a description of these problems more than once.

But there’s a gap between recognizing the pattern and knowing where your system actually stands.

The challenge is that these problems don’t come with obvious warning labels. They develop gradually, and because they develop slowly, teams often lose the ability to see them clearly.

You’ve adapted to the system as it is. The workarounds feel normal. The sections of code nobody touches feel normal. The alarm noise that everyone has learned to mentally filter feels normal. You’re too close to it to see it clearly.

The question then arises: how do experienced practitioners effectively evaluate the health of a control system? Not in a formal engineering audit sense, but in the honest, working-professional sense that helps you figure out what you’re actually dealing with and where to put your energy first.

That’s what this piece is about.

I encourage you to check her out on her website! The full article is here