07-06
Synthesis is harder than analysis
Drawing from the observation that differentiation (local) is far easier than integration (global) in calculus, this post argues that analytic tasks—breaking problems into isolated pieces—are fundamentally simpler than synthetic ones—reassembling those pieces into a coherent whole. For SREs, incident response is inherently synthetic: understanding how components interact across a distributed system requires global knowledge. Yet the industry hasn't recognized building synthesis expertise as a first-class pursuit, partly because it's deeply situated in messy organizational specifics. The author calls for better methods to learn operational details systematically.