Food for Thought: What Restaurants Can Teach Us about Reliability

Nothing is ever perfect; all systems will fail at some point. This is true of everything we might define as a complex system. We could be discussing computer services, living organisms, buildings, or societal structures—at some point failure will occur in these systems. It turns out that failure is actually totally fine, and humans know this innately even if they're not always aware of their own fault tolerance. Like so many other things, restaurants are complex systems made up of many independent complex systems that all rely on each other, just like our computer services. In this talk let's use the experiences we've all had dining at, ordering from, or working at restaurants to draw parallels to how we can better think about the reliability of computers. From The Floor to The Bar to The Line: restaurants have many lessons to teach us.