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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

s/learnings/lessons/g

From my perspective, the number one reason we had a well functioning satellite out of the gate is my philosophy of testing "safe mode first". What that means is in a graduated fashion, test that the hardware and software together can always get you into a safe mode - which is usually power positive, attitude stable, and communicative. So our software integration flows hit this mission thread over and over and over with each update. If we shipped a new software feature, make sure you got to safe mode. If we found a bug that prevented it, it's the first thing to triage. We build out our pipelines to simulate this as much as we could and then ran it again on the development hardware and eventually would load a release onto flight once we were confident this was always solid. If you're going to develop for space, start here.

That principle goes far further than developing for space, but for space the pay-off is the largest. It also applies to maritime, medical, aviation and mining and probably other domains where whatever you make it going to have to function even when you can not reach it at all.

But it is great to point it out and to show how essential this kind of thinking is, and how it can help to focus on what is really important and what can be fixed.

What is interesting is to theorize about the relative impact of losing any of those three and how you managed to fix the second because you still had power and were able to communicate with the device. I think within those the order of relative importance would be communications, power and then attitude but I could well be mistaken.

At least it wasn't "learns", like "we had five learns from the project". Like, say, "ad spend". There's already a noun form of a verb, it's called a gerund: "ad spending".

As with genes, duplication creates opportunity for specialization. Regardless of what drives the duplication and early divergence.

AIchat "compare and contrast the subtle implications of phrase/X with phrase/Y" suggests using "ad spend" for a number (like "budget"), and "ad spending" for activity and trend ("act of spending").

"Learns" has implications of discovery, smaller size, iterative, informality, individual/team scale, messy, and more. For illustration, to my ear, "Don't be stupid" fits as a "lesson", but not as a "learn" or a "takeaway". Nor as a "lesson learned", with its implication of formality and reflection. "Software X is flaky" fits better "learn" than "lesson". And "unmonitored vendor excursions are biting us" more a "takeaway" (actionable; practical vs process).

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