A couple weekends ago, I drove with my two young children to a restaurant 20 minutes from our house only to learn that it, a mom-n-pop operation, was closed for a couple of weeks. I suppose I could have called ahead to confirm my presumption that they were open, but I didn't learn about this "planned outage" until I saw the 8.5 x 11 sign on the door. Apparently, they closed for a family vacation.
It would be cool to have some sort of proactive notification when the many assumptions I make about the world around me become incorrect. Take a person's work commute as an example. Presumptions include road availability, public transit timeliness, lack of major events causing traffic delays, sufficient fuel in one's vehicle, the line at Starbucks being reasonable, no horrible weather forecast which would require bringing an umbrella along, etc. Imagine an app which invoked a bunch of figurative assert statements on the presumptions we make daily in life.
I'm posting this here simply because it entered my stream of consciousness when I saw the headline. At first, I thought that "real world" status is un-related to the problem StatusPage solves. However, sending notifications to customers upon an outage is a step closer to my handwaving above. Take as an example the availability of employee VPN access. How many times have you gone home early presuming that you would be able to work later in the evening and later realized that you can't kick off that build, etc. While learning that the VPN server is down doesn't help you do your work, you probably are more likely to find that your co-worker is still at the office at 7:00 PM than three hours later. Maybe you would have been lucky enough to learn about the outage before you left the office.
One problem I see is that being alerted about every presumption violation would be annoying. I'd like to infer intent somehow. "I'm going to work today" implies a lot about what's important for me to know. Being informed about "outages" certainly would be an incentive to put a zillion things on my calendar. What if you were planning to see a band at a bar next Thursday, and adding the event to your calendar somehow allowed proactive notification in case of cancellation?
We take it as a given that life will surprise us with disappointments, but this condition might only be the result of historically high costs of sending and receiving notifications. Does anyone remember phone trees? Watching the TV to learn of school closings? Making detailed logistical plans about how to meet-up with friends (along with various contingencies) in the days before mobile phones? Technology replaced these annoyances, and there's no reason to believe all progress has been made. I want the absence of notifications to imply that life will abide by my presumptions.
It would be cool to have some sort of proactive notification when the many assumptions I make about the world around me become incorrect. Take a person's work commute as an example. Presumptions include road availability, public transit timeliness, lack of major events causing traffic delays, sufficient fuel in one's vehicle, the line at Starbucks being reasonable, no horrible weather forecast which would require bringing an umbrella along, etc. Imagine an app which invoked a bunch of figurative assert statements on the presumptions we make daily in life.
I'm posting this here simply because it entered my stream of consciousness when I saw the headline. At first, I thought that "real world" status is un-related to the problem StatusPage solves. However, sending notifications to customers upon an outage is a step closer to my handwaving above. Take as an example the availability of employee VPN access. How many times have you gone home early presuming that you would be able to work later in the evening and later realized that you can't kick off that build, etc. While learning that the VPN server is down doesn't help you do your work, you probably are more likely to find that your co-worker is still at the office at 7:00 PM than three hours later. Maybe you would have been lucky enough to learn about the outage before you left the office.
One problem I see is that being alerted about every presumption violation would be annoying. I'd like to infer intent somehow. "I'm going to work today" implies a lot about what's important for me to know. Being informed about "outages" certainly would be an incentive to put a zillion things on my calendar. What if you were planning to see a band at a bar next Thursday, and adding the event to your calendar somehow allowed proactive notification in case of cancellation?
We take it as a given that life will surprise us with disappointments, but this condition might only be the result of historically high costs of sending and receiving notifications. Does anyone remember phone trees? Watching the TV to learn of school closings? Making detailed logistical plans about how to meet-up with friends (along with various contingencies) in the days before mobile phones? Technology replaced these annoyances, and there's no reason to believe all progress has been made. I want the absence of notifications to imply that life will abide by my presumptions.