Change Advisory Board

Tag: Data integrity

  • The Mason and The Mainframe

    The Mason and The Mainframe

    What do the IBM Z Mainframe and Ancient Freemasonry have in common? They are both obsessed with one thing: Endurance.

    In this episode of The Cab Call, we attempt a seemingly absurd comparison between the digital world and the social world. We pit the “Mainframe Advocate” against the “Masonry Advocate” to debate the concept of State Preservation.

    One runs on silicon, electricity, and error-correcting code. The other runs on ritual, memory, and oral tradition. Both are trying to achieve the exact same goal: keeping a specific set of data intact while the world around them changes.

    The Challenge: Which is harder? Preserving a banking ledger with zero corruption for 60 years, or preserving a spoken ritual word-for-word for six centuries?

    Transmission: How Mainframe modernization (CDC, Refactoring) compares to Masonic “Word Pairs” and the “Attentive Ear.”

    Resilience: Disaster recovery (GDPS, Metro Mirror) vs. the distributed network of human memory.

    The Crisis: How both systems face an identical existential threat—the skills gap and the need for apprenticeship.

    Join us as we decide whether it’s harder to preserve a binary digit or a moral truth.

    Sources

  • Stone, Soul, and Software

    Stone, Soul, and Software

    The philosophical principles underlying human conduct and ancient wisdom traditions establish a framework for understanding order and morality. Marcus Aurelius emphasized that the body is perishable, merely a “little flesh and breath” or a “network, a contexture of nerves, veins, and arteries”, while the rational soul should seek to know itself and choose its own nature. The end for rational animals is to follow reason, be content with destiny, and understand that the Universe is transformation. This pursuit of wisdom is paralleled in Freemasonry, which holds that all elevating and benign religions share fundamental truths. Masonry, founded on Geometry, or the fifth science, utilizes symbols like the Rough Ashlar, representing the unpolished mind awaiting cultivation through liberal education, and the pillars Boaz and Jachin, which denote strength and stability.

    Ancient texts, particularly the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, have shaped modern language and literature. The KJV has contributed more to English than perhaps any other literary source, providing phrases like “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41) and introducing words like helpmate, derived from “help meet for him” in Genesis. Its influence is evident across English literature in works by Shakespeare, John Milton (Paradise Lost), Herman Melville (Moby-Dick), and C.S. Lewis. The original KJV included the Old Testament, New Testament, and the Apocrypha, though the Apocrypha was later removed in the 1800s by scholars concerned about contradictions and whether the books were divinely inspired. The KJV is textually connected to the Textus Receptus, and resources like the King James Bible Dictionary exist to clarify its content, covering topics such as Strong’s Numbers.

    In modern technology, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) embodies a structured approach to maintaining complex systems, focusing on reliability as the “most fundamental feature of any product”. SRE, which originated from asking a software engineer to design an operations team, caps operational work (toil)—defined as manual, repetitive work that scales linearly—at 50% of an engineer’s time to ensure focus on engineering projects. Core SRE principles include managing service risk using error budgets, employing automation to maximize consistency and reduce costs, and utilizing distributed consensus algorithms like Paxos and Chubby to manage critical state reliably across failures. Monitoring is essential, prioritizing actionable alerts (immediate human intervention) and classifying outputs clearly (Alerts, Tickets, Logging). These practices, particularly preparedness, postmortem analysis, and automation, align with fundamental lessons learned across other high-reliability industries, such as the nuclear navy, defense, and aviation.

    Source #01: Site Reliability Engineering edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy

    Source #02: Contribution of the King James Bible to the English Language – International Journal of Applied Research

  • The Square and the Server

    The Square and the Server

    In this episode, Change Advisory Board draws a straight line from the lodge to the datacenter via the square, exploring how the symbolic working tools of Freemasonry — the gauge, gavel, square, level, plumb, compasses, and trowel — can be reinterpreted as instruments of modern Site Reliability Engineering.

    From the Entered Apprentice’s 24-inch gauge to the SRE’s time budgets and service-level objectives, each tool becomes a lens for understanding the moral and operational discipline behind reliable systems. The common gavel’s task of removing rough edges parallels how engineers refine noise from telemetry. The Fellow Craft’s square and level emerge as early templates for data integrity and fairness — the moral geometry of incident response. The plumb rule, once a test of uprightness, becomes the model for aligned observability: systems and people both measured against their true vertical.

    Finally, the Master Mason’s compasses and trowel remind us that every great system — like every enduring fraternity — is held together not by code alone but by the invisible cement of trust, accountability, and shared purpose. Observability, in this light, is not just about data; it is the moral act of ensuring that what we build is true, just, and aligned with the architecture of higher principles.

    It’s a conversation about craftsmanship in code and in character — an investigation into how the oldest working tools of humanity still guide the newest disciplines of reliability engineering.

    Source #1: The Lecture of the Second Degree of Freemasonry

    Source #2: Site Reliability Engineering edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy