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This is Chaos Engineering, a newsletter on Entropy
This is Chaos Engineering1, a newsletter about engineering, machine learning, economics, statistics, finance, and startups.
That’s a lot of topics but these are all things I love!
I’ve spent a decade working in Fintech at some of the largest financial institutions in the world (AIG, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and Goldman Sachs), startups (Fast, Unidos), and a post-IPO Fintech company (Affirm) in roles spanning data science, machine learning, software, data engineering, credit, and fraud.
I’m also an angel investor and an LP in the Fintech Fund.
Some of the articles I write will be from my blog and others I’ll write only here but they’ll cover all the different topics I mentioned above, hopefully from an engineering perspective. 😉
Why “Chaos Engineering”? Because the modern world is chaos and engineers make their best attempts to impose structure on a chaotic world sprinting towards entropy and I find that wildly entertaining.
I think Shane Parrish best described chaos and entropy, and it quite perfectly reflects my worldview, so I will leave you with his words.
Entropy, a measure of disorder, explains why life seems to get more, not less, complicated as time goes on.
All things trend toward disorder. More specifically, the second law of thermodynamics states that “as one goes forward in time, the net entropy (degree of disorder) of any isolated or closed system will always increase (or at least stay the same).
Entropy is simply a measure of disorder and affects all aspects of our daily lives. In fact, you can think of it as nature’s tax.
Left unchecked disorder increases over time. Energy disperses, and systems dissolve into chaos. The more disordered something is, the more entropic we consider it. In short, we can define entropy as a measure of the disorder of the universe, on both a macro and a microscopic level. The Greek root of the word translates to “a turning towards transformation” — with that transformation being chaos."
It’s worth noting that Chaos Engineering is a framework in software used to randomly (maybe chaotically 😉) trigger failures to test the resilience of the service; I am not referring to that framework…I am writing quite literally about the chaos of engineering. 😊
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The entropy of a closed system increases monotonically with time, but in an open system some parts can become more ordered by taking advantage of energy flowing through the system. This is the thermodynamic foundation of life.
Chaos, I think of as the consequence of a system whose dynamic evolution cannot be predicted deterministically from initial conditions. Do you have a better definition? A fellow grad student, Eduardo Engel, wrote his thesis on the connection between chaos theory and randomness. It spoke to me. (A Road to Randomness in Physical Systems, Springer Lecture Notes in Statistics No. 71, New York: Springer Verlag, 1992.)
I’m looking forward to your posts!
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