I almost called this blog “The Failure Modes” since I have a soft spot for figuring out how things fail. Something that I remember vividly from childhood is taking things apart to see how they worked. Its real world job form was in Reliability Engineering. Specifically, the process of methodically coming up with ways a designed hardware/system can fail then how to design those failures out of it. In the process, test things to failure to learn from them. This is the hand wavy way of explaining what Design Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (DFMEA).

Over the years of working and building Reliability Engineering teams, I now have the curse of, after admiring the new designs, quickly going down rabbit holes to find ways of improving the most amazing, shiny, exciting systems by looking for ways they may fail. This page will have some of my learnings and rants.