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How intuition makes us better engineers
Becoming a Better Engineer — Part 1
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. — Albert Einstein
How it all started
The realization that intuition was going to be important happened approximately 15 years ago.
Cloud computing was still in its infancy and the company I worked with was one of the early adopters. We had a simple 3-tier application comprised of a load-balancer, the backend application, and a database.
At the time, AWS didn’t offer any managed load balancer so we had to deploy our own ones.
Thanks to a successful sale, our traffic was going to triple almost over night.
Shortly after the traffic started to increase, alarms set off. Client errors went through the roof and the load traffic graph looked something like that.
