Change Advisory Board

Tag: Incident response

  • Compassion and The Compass

    Compassion and The Compass

    This episode walks straight into the messy, human middle ground between loving people and losing yourself in the process. Using the story of Paul and Eunice—a sober helper and a deeply traumatized veteran—we unpack what compassion really looks like when trauma, addiction, resentment, and financial collapse all live under the same roof.

    Guided by the compass of Freemasonry and the inner fortress of Stoic philosophy, we explore the idea of the cable tow as a moral boundary: the point beyond which “helping” turns into self-destruction. We connect that to how we run systems and services under stress—incidents, outages, RTOs, RPOs, blameless postmortems—and show that both people and platforms need the same thing: clear limits, honest observation, and recovery plans that actually work.

    This isn’t an abstract seminar. It’s trauma, rent, sobriety, hatred, love, and the quiet power of one small, consistent life lived decently in front of another broken person.

    In this episode, we explore:

    • How trauma reshapes a worldview—and why one honest counter-example can start to crack it

    • Why “compassion does not require self-immolation,” and what healthy boundaries really look like

    • How Marcus Aurelius would diagnose over-giving, resentment, and walking away “without hatred”

    • The parallels between personal recovery and organizational recovery: incidents, DR tests, and blameless postmortems

    • Practical steps for people who feel like Paul (the overwhelmed helper) or Eunice (the traumatized survivor) today

    This is an episode about keeping your heart open and your compass steady.

    Source #01: Paul and Eunice is a personal story from real people in my personal life. Names have been changed to protect the identities of the individuals.

  • 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