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Getting Unstuck: Routine Postmortems
This is a post is in the Useful Ideas series.
From Reactive to Proactive
Cybersecurity often gets stuck:
- triaging the same types of alerts and events that came yesterday
- gathering the same kind of data to answer questions that were asked for last audit
- finding more of the same classes of security bugs in software
- playing whack-a-mole patching the worst vulnerabilities
- writing up risks similar to ones found during the last business initiative
If you aren’t in cybersecurity, you’ve probably seen a similar predicament in your domain. When a team is constantly in reactive mode, it feels inescapable. I can’t drop any of these required activities. Where would I find the time to change things?" But finding a time to invest in doing less of these activities is the only way to break the cycle.
In my work with organizations, I use a several methods to break this cycle, but I want to share one option with you here: routine postmortems.
You’re likely familiar with a variety of techniques for diagnosing how something went wrong. Five Whys, Root Cause Analysis, Blameless Postmortems, and more. If run well, these can be a very powerful tool for understanding the process, system, and even cultural problems that led to a breakdown. They also level up the organization through knowledge sharing and by implementing changes that stop the same type of problem from resurfacing.
However, if your organization is in reactive mode, you probably don’t feel like you have the bandwidth to perform these analyses for all but the very worst of events, and even when you do, you struggle to find time to implement any changes that would prevent the problem from reoccurring.
Shifting from ineffective formal emergency retrospectives to ongoing proactive analysis requires a cultural shift.
Routine Postmortems allow you to start to build the change into the fabric of your organization.
Implementing
Start small. Select a recurring time for the team to meet (somewhere between weekly and quarterly), or reserve some time in an existing meeting cadence. In preparation for the meeting, the team(s) should bring one reactive event from the last period for each functional area, along with an initial analysis. They should not spend much time on the analysis (less than the meeting itself is booked for). It’s better if these are not full emergency incidents. For example, within cybersecurity, items could include:
- a SOC alert
- an audit or pentest finding
- a vulnerability
- a configuration error
- a design weakness
- an unmitigated risk
Walk through a light version of your chosen diagnostic process, giving extra opportunity for team members to ask questions with nonjudgmental curiosity and to chime in with additional ideas on what upstream changes could have avoided the problem.
Go through as many categories as you have time to go through, but it’s ok if it’s just one! (Simply rotate the focus category next time.)
It’s better if this isn’t heavy with formality, but it’s perfectly fine to jot down takeaways and decisions.
When It’s Working
- preparing for the meeting, and even knowing they will be preparing for the meeting, gets people re-orienting their mindset towards problem prevention over firefighting
- silos of problem-responding are breaking down, people are learning from each other, and solutions (which often require cross-team collaboration) are emerging
- people are seeing that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, and that the effort invested is freeing up time for more strategic work
Failure Modes
Blamestorming: it’s tempting to criticize an initial analysis or to focus on people instead of problems. Use your facilitation skills to align the conversation to the future, not to the past. Practicing this routine will help the team improve at both analysis and problem-solving.
Giving Up on Ops: routine postmortems aren’t an excuse to stop responding entirely. Remember this is a method to carve out a slice of time to turn the ship.
Lack of Follow-Through: if people are having great ideas, but nothing is changing, then you likely have execution problems. That’s another topic, but one thing you can try is picking the quickest win from each session and making sure the right person has ownership to drive that result.
Something Else?: If you’ve tried this and run into other problems that you want to debug, I’m happy to help!
Working in Public
This is a post is in the Useful Ideas series.
“Working in Public” or “Working with the Garage Door Open” or “Working with the Garage Door Up” are related concepts that invoke the idea that for some work, it is better not to toil in secret.
Potential benefits to you: rapid & diverse feedback, getting assistance, finding collaborators, finding people who would benefit from your work
Potential benefits to others: keeping collaborators updated, helping others learn from your mistakes, helping people “not in the room”
π Euchre: Going Under
Like a lot of card games, there are variants depending on where you grew up, who you played with, etc.
Tonight, I learned a somewhat boggling (but also interesting) one: “going under”.
“Going under” means that when it is your term to bid (which is a yes/no or suit declaration in Euchre, rather than a number), you can sacrifice your bid to take three 9s or 10s from your hand and exchange them with the kitty. The extra interesting part of this is that the people I learned it from say you never show the cards you exchange with the kitty. I’m sure many players have taken advantage of that fact.
I grew up with something a little different. If you had all 9s and 10s, you could show them and declare “Farmers Hand” which became a misdeal, and thus, the deal passed to the next player.
Have you used any rules like this? What was your variation?
π Tens
Learned another game this weekend: Tens.
Setup
You need enough decks (without Jokers) for all players to have 19 cards. Shuffle ’em up.
Each player grabs a pile of cards from the deck and makes 4 stacks in front of them, as well as a hand of cards. Each stack has one face-down card on the bottom and one face-up card on the top. The other 11 cards go in their hand. Anyone who grabbed exactly 19 cards, gets -10 points (this is good!) for this round. Any player that didn’t pull exactly 19 cards makes up the difference using the deck.
Play starts with whoever pulled closest to 19 cards, and goes clockwise. The first player is suggested to be whoever had closest to 19 cards.
Eligible Plays
Cards are played into a central pile. A player may play as many cards of a rank as they like, using a combination of their face-up cards and cards in their hand. They may alternatively play an uncovered 1 face down card, and, after seeing what it is, add as many matching face-up or hand cards as they like.
Results of a Play
Any time the count of cards of the current rank on the pile becomes 4 or more (e.g. five Jacks), or a Ten is played, the current player discards the entire pile and takes an additional turn.
If they played at the current rank or lower (and there are still less than 4 of that rank on top), play moves to the next player.
However, if they played a card higher than the current rank (other than a Ten), the player must take the whole pile into their hand and play another turn.
Ending the Round and Scoring
Once a player gets rid of all their cards (stacks and hand), play stops for the round. That player gets 0 points for the round, and everyone else is penalized for all of their remaining cards. Cards are scored by their rank value, with Aces being 1, Jack 11, Queen 12, King 13, and Tens 20. (Don’t forget the -10 for any player that pulled exactly 19 cards when setting up the round.)
Winning
Play more rounds, but one suggestion is to play until someone has hit 100 (ten tens).
Whoever has the fewest points at the end wins!
Have you played this (or something like it)? How did your version differ?
-
because the face-up card on it has already been played ↩︎
π 2024 Books Review
other 2024 reviews here
I am tracking all my completed books on my reading page and everything on Storygraph. (why Storygraph?) I would like to use micro.blog’s bookshelves, but it’s too buggy and incomplete at this stage.
This was a slow year, so I only completed 42 books. Here’s the summary from Storygraph.
Highly Recommended Books:
Non-Fiction:
- Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Still a relevant diagnosis for many of our current ills. (book) (post)
- The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World… by David Graeber (posthumously). What if things don’t have to be the way they are? (book) (post)
- The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. We are reaping the results from sowing distorted thinking. (book) (post)
Fiction:
- The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (book) (post)
- The Curse of Chalion (World of Five Gods #1) by Lois McMaster Bujold (book) (post)
- The Future by Naomi Alderman (book) (post)
Recommended Books
(Reverse-chronological order)
- Polostan (Bomblight #1) by Neal Stephenson (book)
- Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy (book)
- Midnight Riot (Rivers of London #1) by Ben Aaronovitch (book) (post)
- Mort (Discworld #4) by Terry Pratchett (book)
- The Shape of Joy by Richard Beck (book) (post)
- Convergence Problems by Wole Talabi (book)
- Dopamine Nation by Anna Lemke (book) (post)
- Death of a Cad (Hamish Macbeth #2) by M. C. Beaton (book)
- The Nature of the Beast (Gamache #11) by Louise Penny (book)
- Slow Productivity by Cal Newport (book) (post)
- Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg (book) (post)
- The Rise and Reign of Mammals by Steve Brusatte (book)
- The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist (book) (post)
- Equal Rites (Discworld #3) by Terry Pratchett (book)
- Radical Respect by Kim Scott (book) (post)
- The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne (book) (post)
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (book)
- Assassin’s Quest (Farseer Trilogy #3) by Robin Hobb (book)
- The PARA Method by Tiago Forte (book) (post)
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πΆ 2024 Music Review
other 2024 reviews here
2024 was the year that I found out that iTunes Match and Apple Music were “eating” my music by dropping files, replacing with different editions/formats, or failing to sync some material. I already knew that Google did terrible things when going from Google Play Music to Youtube music, but Apple was a surprise to me. I resolved to not let such things happen any more.
I set out to rebuild my library by:
- re-downloading lossless versions of my Bandcamp purchases
- getting the best format download from other places I’d bought digital music
- re-ripping our CDs in lossless format
- backing it all up
- normalizing metadata with MusicBrainz Picard
- running Plex Media Server to share the music
- running Tailscale to make the server available without putting it directly on the web
- running PlexAmp clients for an awesome listening experience
- scrobbling my listening with last.fm
I’m not finished with the project, but I have over 200 artists, 600 albums, and 6000 tracks re-deployed, with much more to come. Because I’m not complete, the listening may not have as much variety as it could have.
Artists:
- Clubroot is my go-to for evening chillout music
- Juno Reactor is a constant fave
- 3-5 are prolific industrial-ish artists that use various project pseudonyms, and I listen to a lot of each
Albums:
- HolyName’s self-titled is sorta doomcore taize and is a great Sunday listen
- Excursions is a collection of early Front Line Assembly side-project work
- Imagine… is a re-release of Juno Reactor’s first 5 albums as a compilation
- Celldweller is another project from Circle of Dust (Klayton/Scott) which has probably eclipsed CoD
- A Homeland Denied was a hardcore compilation as benefit for Palestinians
- Trans-Siberian Orchestra broke in for me this year, mostly because of their Christmas music
Tracks:
- 1 and 3 are a couple of those excellent Clubroot grooves
- Hammer & Gavel is a prophetic anthem from a 2-person wall of sound I discovered this year (American Arson)
- HATEFUL is a single from HEALTH and my favorite thing from them so far
- Listen! was one of my “listen on repeat tracks” this year from Oak Pantheon’s excellent 2023 album “The Absence”
- Kindred Void (and some other Koan Sound) tracks get honorable mentions
As usual, Industrial, Electronic, Metalcore, Rock, and Metal dominate my listening (with many varied subgenres therein).
We are not surprised my listening is not “normal”. I also expect this chart is not my normal either due to the project I mentioned at the start of this post. I’m not sure how useful these are, especially with no definitions. I’m sharing them anyway.
Stay tuned to get a copy of my “faves” playlist, courtesy of Album Whale.
What was your favorite this year? Anything you discovered?
π The Shape of Joy
Read: The Shape of Joy by Richard Beck
Recommended

My Reading Highlights and Notes
- our focus has moved from outside to inside
- faith and spirituality are one of the best predictors of happiness and emotional well-being
- “shape” is referring to the curve of our attention
- “grace exists, and you have to turn away from yourself to find it”
- Cartesian doubt flipped the order of believing in facts from everything observable to the state of our own mind
- What Descartes did for truth, Freud did for mental health
- (and it’s hard to have a “clear, honest” view of ourselves)
- “scarcity trap” - where dealing with one area exacerbates another
- self-esteem can be thought of as the gap between who you are and who you want to be (success vs. pretensions)
- (this is dangerous with our appetites & comparisons & hedonic adaption, also dangerous because you “measure” it and it is variable)
- you can’t “talk someone out of” the cracks in the mirror that are their self-view of self-esteem
- “conspiracies proliferate because we prefer comforting lies over the unexplainable and mysterious”
- (they also create community and give us a “heroic purpose”)
- “there seems to be an asymmetry here between the magnitude of the hatred give the triviality of the subject matter” (this happens in fan culture because we have literally bought into meaning)
- “nothing defines the modern self better than how we vote”
Time, now, to hold up the mirror. I have a few questions to ask you: What’s your hero game? How are you exhausting yourself pursuing status, success, and significance? Why can’t you rest? What bike pump of self-esteem are you working at so furiously to fill your life with purpose? Where are you seeing the devil in the face of others? What are the prejudices at the root of your easy hatreds? I know you (probably) aren’t wearing a cape or a mask, but tell me: What’s your superhero complex?
- “our default mental state is that our minds wander, and getting lost within ourselves makes us unhappy”
- D: depressive rumination
- self-distancing technique: replace personal pronoun with your own name, helps with objectivity
- cognitive restructuring and CBT may still be rumination because it’s still focusing on your thoughts
- ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) goes a step beyond CBT in distancing
- (this gets to the observe/curious angle I’m familiar with in various approaches, like many mindfulness practices)
- contemplative prayer quiets the ego
- “humility is the foundation of happiness”
- (not talking about self-effacing, but less self-invested)
- “awe” and “wonder” can pull us outside ourselves
- “transcendence is the key to joy”
- “science knows the direction of joy and is happy to hand you a map, but science is silent on the source of joy”
- the “firmness” of material vs transcendent world has switched form how ancients experienced it
- we experience more awe from moral beauty than from physical beauty (e.g. courage & kindness over art & nature)
- relational/social “mattering” is important, but cosmic/existential “mattering” is far more important
- (especially since relationships can let you down, especially when you need them most)
- “our perception is affected by what we care about”
- meaning is determined by coherence, purpose, and mattering and joy affects all these and gives a narrative/anchor for 1 & 2
- gratitude also faces outward and is transcendent
- love (especially sacrificial love) must have a firm foundation in healthy ego, not doing the “goldilocks game”
- if you are struggling with the ego/transcendence, find people/things to love and care for: it pulls you outside of yourself
π The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the Worldβ¦
Read: The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World⦠by David Graeber (posthumously)
Recommended
This is a fine collection of Graeber’s essays, covering a variety of periods and topics, but building a robust overview of his work.
Though I have read some of these essays before, the quality of Graeber’s analysis, storytelling, and writing means that I was happy to read them again, and gained additional insights.
The essay “Are You an Anarchist?” reminds me of the “everyday anarchism” series I’ve oft considered writing. E.g. “When you do (thing), anarchism is among you.” ( Secret hint: you usually are an anarchist, or at least act like one.)
Note: I do not recommend the audiobook format.
π Dopamine Nation
Read: Dopamine Nation by Anna Lemke
Recommended
There was not much here that was completely new to me, but the stories were well-told, and it was a useful collection of reminders.
For example, I am reminded once again by the fact that having some self-directed misery in our lives helps us feel much better the rest of the time. Cold baths, ascetic practices, hard exercise, primitive camping, etc. can all help with our balance, perspective, and our physiological state of pain and pleasure.
And also again: leaning into survivable, copeable challenges is often the best way through, and leads to the most growth.
My Reading Highlights and Notes
From the Summary:
- The relentless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain leads to pain
- Recovery begins with abstinence
- Abstinence resets the brainβs reward pathway, and with it our capacity to take joy in simpler pleasures
- Self-binding creates literal and metacognitive space between desire and consumption, a modern necessity in dopamine-overloaded world
- Medications can restore homeostasis, but consider what we lose by medicating away our pain
- Pressing on the pain side resets our balance to the side of pleasure
- Beware of getting addicted to pain
- Radical honesty promotes awareness, enhances intimacy, and fosters a βplentyβ mindset
- Prosocial shame affirms that we belong to the human tribe
- Instead of running away from the world, we can find escape by immersing ourselves in it