It's all about balance, in the end. If you do too much of one thing your business will fail. If you don't do enough of another, your business will fail too. And they're the same thing...

The trick then is to do just enough of everything to avoid disaster and to move as fast as you can to get to a realm where you can actually afford to do it right. Most start-ups initially cut corners like it is crunch time at the circle factory, which then usually catches up with them at some point either killing them or forcing them to adapt a different pace. Knowing exactly when to put more or less attention on some factor is the recipe for success but nobody has managed to execute that recipe twice in a row without finding things that no longer work, so it remains a dynamic affair rather than one you can ritualize.

And that's where checklists shine: repeated processes that are well defined and where change is slow enough that the checklists become 'mostly static', they still change but the bulk of the knowledge condensed in them stays valid over multiple applications.

I guess you are not the only one. Here is talk by Andrew Godwin about using aviation practices for software engineering:

https://youtu.be/d0eo3FxKQNc

In some areas, I absolutely agree... I think when it comes to vehicles, medical devices and heavy equipment, it would be better to see much more rigorous practices in terms of software craftsmanship. I think it should be very similar in financial operations (it isn't) and most govt work in general (it isn't).

In the end, for most scenarios, break fast, fix fast is likely a more practical and cost effective approach.

I make checklists for myself and they're enormously helpful. Because my brain can't always remember every single little detail of every complex task every single time.

I've also seen checklists made by morons that are enormously unhelpful.

IMO it's paramount for whoever is making the checklist to have familiarity with the task at hand (both how to do it properly, and what steps people tend to miss or get wrong), investment (is this tool something you'd find indispensable for yourself if you were placed in the role of executing it?), a sense of pragmatism and conciseness.

The ability to recognize what things will be obvious or flow naturally from A to B helps eliminate redundant fluff. e.g. I train volunteer firefighters and in most canonical steps for calling a Mayday, one is basically "Tell the person on the other end what's wrong". You don't need a checklist item for that. When something goes seriously sideways and you need help, you will be very inclined to convey what is the matter.

> But you never hear about the probably endless companies and organizations that employ worthless checklists that do nothing but waste people's time.

Most if not all the bad checklist I have encountered are all for the same reason, they were not tested or poorly written, and most of the time both.

Not tested in terms the checklist was written by somebody who doesn't actually know how to do the whole project. Unlike Professionals like Doctor ands Pilot where they are well trained and the check list are well understood to be a reminder. The rational behind it were taught and even if not professionals will question if something they dont understands while most other in there field could immediately give a detail answer.

Another example would be HR writing an on-boarding checklist. 99% of the time I have seen those check list are intended to make HR's life easier. Not the candidate or applicants.

Checklist is also a clear and distilled form of writing. And as the saying goes I dont have time to write you a short letter, but I have time for a long one. Writing short points with clarity takes a long time. And not a skill set everyone process. Nor do they have the time to do it when it is not part of their job or KPI.

WHO and Gawande emphasize iteration, that the draft is always wrong. They also claim good checklists are really coordination tools disguised as task lists.

While I certainly found it insightful, I felt like this book (like so many in the genre) was a pamphlet's worth of material inflated to fill about 250 pages.

Thought this would be a blog, disappointed to see it's a whole book. My suspicion is there is 5 good pages of material stretched out 20-50x.

Manual checklists are often the best option for repeated tasks that can't be automated sufficiently reliably and sufficiently economically. But if they can be, then manual checklists are unnecessarily inefficent and/or unreliable. And the more frequently repeated the task is (ceteris paribus), the more up-front energy is justified in automating it. That said, to automate a process, you have to understand it enough to generate a checklist as a prerequisite (and, sure, you can develop that understanding in the course of automation, but doing so first will also go a long way to informing you if automation is likely to be worthwhile.)

That said, and without prejudice to SQLite’s use of checklists which I haven’t deeply considered, while the conditions that make checklists the best choice are definitely present in aviation and surgery in obvious ways, processes around software tend to lend themselves to efficient and reliable automation, with non-transitory reliance on checklists very often a process smell that, while not necessarily wrong, merits skepticism and inquiry.

Yeah, checklists are great. Further, they're even precursors to automation.

For prosterity, the original report on the pilot program with the checklist including introducing names of participants (doi 10.1056/NEJMsa0810119).

Possibly popularised by Atul Gawande “The Checklist Manifesto”.

Meta-comment: LLMs continue to impress me in the capabilities with unearthing information from imprecise inputs/queries.

The stupid answer is that not everything that can be automated should be.

The real answer is of a more philosophical nature, if you manually had to check A, B, C... Z, then you will have a better understanding of the state of the system you work with . If something goes wrong, at least the bits you checked can be disregarded and free you to check other factors. What if your systems correctly report a faulty issue, yet your automatic checklist doesn't catch it?

Also, this manual checklist checks the operator.

You should be automating everything you can, but much care should be put into figuring out if you can actually automate a particular thing.

Automate away the process to deploy a new version of hn, what's the worst that can happen?

But don't automate the pre flight checklist, if something goes wrong while the plane is in the air, people are going to die.

I think a less verbose version of the above is that a human can detect a fault in a sensor, while a sensor can't detect it is faulty itself.

I'm not a pilot, but my brother is, and I watched him a bunch of times go through these before takeoff and landing. I think it's about more than automation, these days the aircraft computer "walks" the pilots through the checklists but it's still their responsibility to verify each item. I think it's an interesting approach to automation, keeping humans in the loop and actually promoting responsibility and accountability, as in "who checked off on these?"

Most/all of those are individually automated.

Someone checks that they ran successfully, and vouches for it.

Automating the automation can be counter productive.

Like the release process is triggered automatically by a tag, then fails after an hour long sequence of complex steps, which forces you to re-tag, but by then your tag is out there.

Or, simply, it's a bad idea to run the entire process from scratch, but you automated it such that it's easiest, so you fix something about it and the only way to test the release process itself is to release, and you now need half a dozen releases to get it right.

> I’ve never gotten fired from a software engineering job for moving slower and building things that work well, work predictably, and are built to last.

In most companies, that’s not how it plays out. Once something works, you’re immediately moved on to the next task. If you’ve had the time and space to refine, polish, and carefully craft your code, you’ve been fortunate.

> Nobody ever complains about the person who’s leaving everything they touch a little cleaner than how they found it.

This should be true, but it's not in my experience. Even small, clear improvements are rejected as off-mission or shunted to a backlog to be forgotten. Like, "cool, but let's hold off on merging this until we can be certain it's safe", or in other words "this is more work for me and I'd really rather not".

Same. But it took learning to ignore everything every manager was telling me: Go faster, ship before I'm ready to ship, proceed without agreed-on and documented requirements, listen to product instead of customers, follow code conventions set by others...

You can definitely go overboard for work. If you want to do it as a hobby, go nuts, but there isn't a point in overengineering far beyond what is needed (recall the Juicero)

I believe every sensible open-source developer strives to keep their software performant. To me, a performance regression is a bug like any other and I got and fix it. Sure, there's no warranty guaranteed in the license, yet no-one who takes their project even a little seriously takes it as "I can break this any way I want".

This is wild, thank you for answering!

About Fossil, I really liked how everything is integrated into the VCS.

My friends also make fun of me having some tools that only I use. Somehow understanding a tool down to the last little bit of detail is satisfying by itself. We live in an era of software bloat that does not make too much sense.

Anyways, thanks for SQLite, I use it for teaching SQL for students and for my custom small scale monitoring system.

I love Fossil, I love SQLite, and I also like Althttpd.

https://sqlite.org/althttpd/doc/trunk/althttpd.md

Just like Fossil vs Git, SQLite vs $SomeRealSQLServer, I wish someday Althttpd would become a no-bullshit self-contained replacement for Nginx/Apache/whatever bloated HTTP servers. It has already proved its working by serving Fossil/SQLite, but configuration/features for serving actual web site is not yet "real production quality", at least that is how I feel.

Overall, what an amazing legacy this set of software has been to the world.

To be fair, there are numerous ways to misuse it. Depending on how and where you are using SQLite, you have to know things about WAL and syncing etc.