Publications
Papers and Presentations on the ideas behind Technique
The Technique language has evolved over 20+ years, starting as on-paper procedures for systems operations tasks, and then growing through different iterations of programming language and approach. The current version is Technique v1, written in Rust.
Over this period a number of presentations on the topic have been given, including several formal papers.
Papers
"Turtles All The Way Up: the Complexity and Hyperbolic Nature of Procedures". Preprint, 2025. Formally defines the Fundamental Unit of Procedure, analyses the complexity of procedures, ralates this complexity to systems design, and explores their fractal and hyperbolic nature.
"If your server is a function, is your company a library?". Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP colocated ICFP), Gothenburg, Sweden 2014. Compositions of ever-larger systems are still systems that be tested using the same practises as smaller components.
"Towards a Fundamental Structure for Tasks". CodeCon, Mount Victoria, Australia 2011. Initial exploration of the compositional nature of procedures.
"Realizing a Graphical User Interface for Procedures". CodeCon, Newnes State Foreest, Australia 2007. Described xseq, an early concept for a GTK desktop application to faciliate working through procedures in real time.
"Mastering Massive Changes and Upgrades to Mission-Critical Systems". 19th Conference on Systems Administration (LISA), San Diego, USA, 2005. A tutorial on proven methods for planning, rehearsing, and safely executing mission critical events.
"Surviving Change". Systems Administrator Guild of Australia (SAGE-AU) Annual Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 2004. The original paper on using procedures to capture the institutional knowledge of an operations team. Argues for the use of formal, versionable documentation of the mission critical events that make up the lifecycle of any large IT platform, and that procedures can be a means of passing learnings on.