Systems Thinking
There’s a particular kind of work that doesn’t show up well on a CV. It doesn’t produce a ticket number. It doesn’t close a Jira card. It’s the two hours, two weeks, or two months, you spend understanding why the system behaves the way it does before you touch anything — because you’ve learned, usually through a specific and memorable incident, that understanding is cheaper than confidence.
That’s what this tag is for.
What I mean by it
Systems thinking, on this site, means something specific. It’s not the management-book version. It means: reasoning about second-order effects. Caring about why a design was made, not just what it does. Noticing that the thing that looks broken is actually doing exactly what it was designed to do — for a use case that no longer exists.
It shows up across the networking work, the platform administration, the inherited environments. The question is always the same: what is this system actually doing, as opposed to what the documentation says it should do?
Where it started
A Year in Station Physics is my earliest documented example of this — though I didn’t have a name for it at the time. Before I was in IT, I was working with environmental monitoring systems that produced imperfect data from imperfect sensors. You learned quickly that the reading and the reality were two different things, and that knowing which one to trust required understanding the measurement, not just reading the output.
That habit transferred.
The posts
The networking series — Making Networks Predictable, Separating the WAN from the Core, Making Redundancy Real — is the most explicit version of this pattern. All three are fundamentally about the gap between intent and implementation.
The Accidental SharePoint SME and Oracle WebCenter — Inheriting the Unmappable are the enterprise platform version: environments so layered with accumulated decisions that understanding them requires working backwards from observed behaviour.
Trying to Explain Networking is the odd one out — it’s about the limits of deep knowledge, and what happens when you understand something so thoroughly that you can no longer explain it to someone who doesn’t.