We gave a lot of documentation to the cloud team or the dedicated team for each new hardware. This documentation was to help them implement support for the hardware, adapt their information system and operate it. Their day to day was managing the hardware and we tried to make it as simple as possible for them.

There is a reason why computer engineering is layer upon layer of abstractions. You can't know everything. Abstractions are useful because they free up some computing space in the brain of the engineer who writes code. Because of this, it becomes easier to add new features. The operating system exists because that is what it does. It abstracts the hardware in a set of almost standard ways. It does that through what is called application programming interface (API).

If you stretch the abstraction layer concept, it can also apply to the relation we had with the teams who used our hardware. Our mission was to give them an abstracted layer for the hardware. It was not necessary for them to know which protocols were used or how the components communicated together. What was important was how to operate it.

They did not need to know these details, we did. What we strived for was to try to not have the layers pierced by the concepts. If the documentation said to diagnose an SFP, you needed to read several I2C pages on a particular sub-system, it was useless to them. The mental cost of understanding that compared to the importance of the task was not balanced.

We were knowledgeable in many protocols, CAN, I2C, SPI, onewire, UART and some bases in USB. We relied on vendor data sheets and sometimes reverse engineering a bit. Each component had its datasheet. Sometimes you needed three or four different datasheets open to implement a feature or fix a bug.

I didn't expect the operators to know how to do these things. Like they did not expect me to understand their information system and the procedures to handover a virtual machine to a client. The documentation was done in a way to reflect the knowledge boundaries. The procedures were simple. If it was too complicated, they would escalate to us. We would fix or add another feature in the toolset to help them manage the production.

It was an alternating back and forth talking and understanding needs. In a sense, similar to my personal life..

If you have missed it, you can read the previous episode here​

To pair with :

• Low Pressure Zone - Clubroot
• Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds