Please pause this persistent predilection pertaining to periodically passionate patterns of pretentious perceptual processing.

Sometimes thought processes get stuck, disconnected, trailing sinew and silken tissue in tragic agony, alone in the vastness, discarded, forgotten. Language has always felt to these sensibilities as a game; a tangled tale of otherwise tired terms and pithy patterns of phrase, of accents and admonitions, just another mode of expressions to become lost within, an entertainment of the mind otherwise disengaged.

Silly games of phrase aside, what is this about personas? It’s once again for the fourty fifth time come to my attention a simple question which is worth a simple answer. The question goes like this:

“Eva who? Winter… sssh own? Winter–schOEn? Winterschön? Ok. Where did she work before? .. and before that?”

or perhaps more directly,

“Eva who? I thought her name was Madeline.”

Indeed, who indeed. Many in my professional life know my middle name, Madeline… thought some prefer Madeleine (like the cookies). I too enjoy those cookies, but I don’t care for my middle name much at all. Nor did I care for it during the years of my maiden name. I also didn’t like those early years when the trauma started, of the family which failed to protect me, and their surname which had to be changed.

I certainly didn’t like having to deal with those later years of having a stalker, of sexual assaults, of the red tape required by a name change, of relocation and another relocation, of new email accounts and licenses and passports and registrations and everything else. Who I was was taken from me by force, not of choice.

When I was much younger and learning about hardware engineering there was a fun game called, “Anthropomorphization and Personifications”. This was a name which I could barely say, but otherwise which most children would engage in while playing with toys or dolls, except I was playing it with the innards of a IBM 5150 while holding a screwdriver and attempting not o lose any screws.

In this game ​the graphics board, the massive hard drive, floppies, serial and parallel devices, etc.. they had people names and people jobs and they operated the machine when the power was turned on. In my imagination there were little figures going about their day to day, carrying data, pouring bits and bytes through the (cabling/interconnects) plumbing, talking to others, just living their lives. Many entertaining day dreams for a first through whatever grade elementary school aged brain.

Somewhere prior to adulthood I’d have certain “technical conflicts” with broken hardware, and sometimes that hardware needeed to be shown what happens if it doesn’t fulfill its design. Details are irrelevant, but one could imagine a teenage me watching Office Space and rather enjoying the printer scene out in a grass field… oh that resonnated so well, nearly like a re-enactment of my travels to construction sites to drop burnt-out cards or locked-up drives or other hardware from heights or find its otherwise ensured demise by force. After all, it was my moral duty to ensure that no one else could ever be harmed by that equipment ever again, to prevent others of naïveté and youthful innocence from ever having to feel what I had felt. Clearly those inclinations were about more than the broken hardware in my hands, those core components of a dysfunctional machine, but where and when my youth occurred there was no support or awareness of childhood trauma therapy, and parents could not be trusted to avoid the risk of either victim blaming or creating somehow worse problems. So as would be the common endurace, I would manage it myself, alone and in silence.

Someone, some adult, any of them, should have understood what was happening and helped. Perhaps I was too well practiced at remaining silent, guarded, self-reliant, subdued, secretive. Those are learned behaviors, and they are learned not from positive or healthy life events. Perhaps those adults looked into my large blue eyes, set against porcelain skin, rosy-red hued cheeks, and perhaps what they saw was a truth they refused to accept, and so the pleading gaze was brushed off with a common refrain, “you are SO cute! look at those blue eyes, who could say no?” Indeed, how could I have said no when no one listened? Instead, I learned to say nothing at all.

Well, several decades later and those thoughts and truths are most often in the background, perhaps occasionally at the periphery, rarely surfacing until an unrelated recounting of youth unfolds; in this case a story of anthropomorphism in hardware, almost entirely unrelated to trauma from all those years ago. Regardless, PTSD interjects on unmitigated impulse, disrupts dopamine response programming out of the blue, and tries to pull the mind right back to the events to be relived. All methods of prevention and response are temporary. Trauma never truly goes away, even on the best of days, it may only be lived with, coped against, endured.

Returning to the present, that game never really stopped, and when I take apart systems - occasionally ones costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars - there are still daydreams and wandering imaginations of similar anthropomorphic events, but certainly they exist in a much more futuristic landscape from the sci-fi retro-future. I no longer retire equipment with the same dedication or passion; or perhaps modern construction sites are simply not as accessible as they once were, their heights no longer able to be explored.

See that image? Right around the mid-section we see a common problem with the manner in which code is shipped to production. That one little section, displayed as a subsection of “build & packaging”, happily named “regression + performance testing”. Whether the product is a user-facing site, or middle-ware component, or baremetal systems which provide cloud resources that we all know and (sometimes) love… the success of the product is gated by an org’s ability to prioritize testing and automations for “Performance XOR Regression” (some orgs consider them inclusive, some consider them separate).

So we see Performance and Regressions visualized as practically a footnote, which is representative of the present landscape: many orgs don’t understand regression at scale vs regression in labs vs regression modeling. Most concerning is that too many orgs fail to provide management directives which involve full Perf+Reg test coverage. Instead, as a result of the lack of understanding, many orgs expect that their engineering teams will miraculously “make time” in their fully allocated and often over-subscribed schedules. That is not possible, and when production suffers, we all suffer. (insert meme with person riding bike, then falling from their own mistakes, wincing in pain on the ground, painfully expressing “Why would the code do this to us?")

Secondly, a common misconception from engineering (eng teams and their management structure) is that Perf/Reg testing exists solely in that one stage. One simple misconception often causes an array of new and unnecessary tech debt, while often concurrently perpetuating existing tech debt.

Ok. So who is not failing at Performance and Regression testing? We can look to the ground-breaking engineering efforts on projects which have defined the human race: Voyager I and II, the J.Webb Space Telescope, CERN’s particle accelerators, and many others. What’s the difference? Time and planning, adhering to standards, routine audits, change controls, and many more.

How about simpler projects? Do they attend to P&R as well as JBL or CERN or Los Alamos? Unfortunately not. Over the course of nearly a quarter century of focus on this and related topics, the strong majority of orgs which I’ve had the pleasure of working at have engaged in “Spectrum Testing” instead of “Binary Testing” when it comes to performance + regression analysis, expecting that half-measures will be sufficient. They are not, and because this area of engineering requires investment of time, people, and hardware, it often becomes a budgetary line item to cross out during the times in which it is most critical. Such is the reality of simple and sometimes willful ignorance. Humans are fallible, expectedly so, but the beautiful thing is that we can change and learn and improve; but how… through awareness, analysis, and iterative adjustment (just like in engineering).

Investing partially, whether fiscally or in human hours, is not sufficient. Planning these elements for success always requires time, hardware, and people: investment and awareness. No one sends a telescope into Lagrange orbit one half-million miles from earth without proper test coverage (this isn’t the Hubble (sorry, sorry, I know it’s not funny)). The reasons are obvious. However, back on terra, faulty and insufficiently tested code can deploy to a hyperscaler’s cloud with sufficient impact that national and global infrastructure goes offline, and that code can ship without a second set of eyes? Yep. It happens, but it does not need to happen. We can expect better, and we should. Engineers and end-users and everyone else deserves better.

Easier said than done, sure, but there are no improvements without intention and action. Orgs must be dedicated to P&R coverage, and they must be receptive to potential improvements and course corrections. It requires management to be aware that “performance” does not imply “efficiency” and vice-versa. Quite simply, gaining any benefits from sufficient test coverage requires that management embrace improvements to “testing culture” within their org, and to ensure that sufficient time/cycles/bandwidth on each engineering team’s schedule is inclusive of engagement with org-wide performance engineering directives.

[1] LinkedIN image reference: www.linkedin.com/feed/upda…

Remission is an interesting term in its lexical use.

• “diminution of force or effects”, c. 1600.
• “abatement of penalty or punishment”, c. 1736

In the context of those implications and meanings, yes absolutely that’s the impression from the past two months, a surprisingly rapid two months since a second front was opened during the “Hypophysis-Infundibular War”. Well, guess what? The tumour is in remission now.

Why, or how? This is the result of a new medication regimen, a recent geographic relocation, and many iterative improvements within response/activation programming for the Locus-Coeruleus, Substantia Nigra, and various other impossibly beautifully complex brain structures which define a personality.

The simplest expression which captures the reality of this war which has been raging inside for seven continuous years, with one failed front (07'22 - 06'23)..

• Remission is a cause for and a direct result of “Hypothalamic Mediated Happiness” (HMH)
• Remission requires a cyclical, self-reinforcing, positive feedback, loop-governed state of “Feeling and experiencing Happiness at its most capacitive level” – a prolonged and elevated experiential state resulting from biochemical-messengers otherwise referred to as ‘Love’.

Overly simplified version:

• Prolonged existential unhappiness = makes tumour bigger (cyclical, each makes the other worse)
• Prolonged existential happiness = makes tumour smaller (cyclical, each makes the other better)

Surely it cannot be that simple. Of course, it is not simple but then is the endless striving for love and happiness ever a simple endeavor? Not for me, not in this lifetime. It has been the forever, the endurance, the balance, it is the physiological state of homeostasis which results in cognitive/emotive pleasure as a means to encourage positive actions which keep us alive. Love and happiness keep us going, and so without those - well what’s the point?

So then, happiness is contingent upon dopamine being in balance with the rest of the neuro/endocrine system, otherwise there can be no homeostasis, no balance, no calm or quiet, only turbulence and misery. So then, remission necessarily involves finding ways to maintain cognitive-emotional states where Dopamine is maintained in a balance. This is not a single vector achievement at all.

Maintaining Dopaminergic balance cannot be obtained solely by medication. it must be inclusive of the ways in which we navigate the world, respond to events, and the manner in which our cognitive/apparitional states fluctuate.

During those seven years, non-coincidentally the entire time of being at $corp, the conditions exacerbated tumour growth. During those seven years of providing architecture solutions for global network infrastructure, seven years of investing my cognitive functions at the expense of a simplified notion of happiness, hoping and wanting and being patient for the ship to right the storms… years ago I knew that was a hopeless endeavor. I knew that no true happiness could exist in that place after a certain time, and not only for myself. I was only one woman.. one progressively unhappy woman who could not prevent the events which unfolded for too many others. That feeling of failure never went away, and ‘survivors guilt’ is not a happy place.

Test post. The variable value specifies the vicissitudes of vectorized validity of variablities.