The inculcation of systems thinking

As is known but perhaps not widely reported, all three of us on Team DTrace are products of Brown University Computer Science. More specifically, we were all students in (and later TAs for) Brown’s operating systems course, CS169. This course has been taught by the same professor, Tom Doeppner, over its thirty year lifetime, and has become something of a legend in Silicon Valley, having produced some of the top engineers at major companies like NetApp, SGI, Adobe, and VMware – not to mention tons of smaller companies. And at Sun, CS169 has cast a particularly long shadow, with seven CS169 alums (Adam, Dan, Dave, Eric, Matt, Mike and me) having together played major roles in developing many of the revolutionary technologies in Solaris 10 (specifically, DTrace, ZFS, SMF, FMA and Zones).

I mention the Brown connection because this past Thursday, Brown hosted a symposium to honor both the DTrace team in particular and the contributions of former CS169 undergraduate TAs more generally. We were each invited to give a presentation on a topic of our choosing, and seizing the opportunity for intellectual indulgence, I chose to reflect on a broad topic: the inculcation of systems thinking. My thoughts on this topic deserve their own lengthy blog entry, but this presentation will have to suffice for now – albeit stripped of the references to the Tupolev Tu-144, LBJ, Ray Kurzweil, the 737 rudder reversal and Ruby stack backtraces that peppered (or perhaps polluted?) the actual talk…