Y2K and Other Disappointing Disasters: How To Create Fizzle

In her talk at RubyConf 2017, Heidi Waterhouse explores the themes of risk reduction and harm mitigation, using the Y2K phenomenon as a case study. She highlights how proactive measures in technology and infrastructure can prevent disasters or minimize their impact when they do occur.

Key Points Discussed:
- Understanding Risk Reduction and Harm Mitigation: Waterhouse explains the distinction between risk reduction, which aims to prevent disasters from happening (e.g., anti-lock brakes, vaccinations), and harm mitigation, which seeks to lessen the impact of disasters that do occur (e.g., fire sprinklers, seatbelts).
- The Y2K Experience: She recounts the extensive preparations taken by tech professionals, including system upgrades and rigorous testing, which ultimately resulted in minimal disruption when the year 2000 arrived.
- The Importance of Infrastructure: Waterhouse emphasizes how societies can learn from past disasters, particularly through examples such as building codes that save lives following catastrophic events like earthquakes or fires.
- Real-Life Examples of Failure and Success: She discusses the Grenfell Tower fire in London, where lack of safety regulations led to significant loss of life, contrasting it with the successful evacuation from the Torch Tower fire in Dubai due to stricter codes.
- Complex Systems and Interconnected Failures: The talk explains that modern software systems are complex and can lead to unpredictable failures, as seen in LinkedIn's issues with simultaneous feature activation.
- Strategies for Disaster Prevention: She recommends strategies like utilizing microservices, implementing automation for recovery processes, and designing systems for better flexibility and resilience.

Conclusions and Takeaways:
- Embracing a proactive mindset towards risk management can significantly reduce the likelihood of catastrophic failures.
- It is crucial to recognize that while complete risk elimination is impossible, effective planning and mitigation strategies can prepare systems and individuals to handle adverse outcomes more effectively.
- Organizations should continuously test their systems and improve upon failures to build a culture of resilience against disasters. Waterhouse encourages professionals to think critically about potential failure points and to actively work on strategies for prevention.

Y2K and Other Disappointing Disasters: How To Create Fizzle
Heidi Waterhouse • November 30, 2017 • New Orleans, LA • Talk

Y2K and Other Disappointing Disasters: How To Create Fizzle by Heidi Waterhouse

Risk Reduction is trying to make sure bad things happen as rarely as possible. It's anti-lock brakes and vaccinations and irons that turn off by themselves and all sorts of things that we think of as safety modifications in our life.

Harm Mitigation is what we do so that when bad things do happen, they are less catastrophic. Building fire sprinklers and seatbelts and needle exchanges are all about making the consequences of something bad less terrible.

This talk is focused on understanding where we can prevent problems and where we can just make them less bad.

RubyConf 2017