Quotes from Matthew Skelton

Sometime it's more difficult to know the question than to find an answer.

Wisdom speaks with a silent tongue.

She smiled. How...cute. She chose the word rather like a candy, which she bit.

The safest place to hide a leaf is in a forest.

Naked we're born, naked we'll go, See how the vain are soon brought low. God speed the poor boy on his way, Fear not, we'll meet some other day.

It held an eye to the future and a tongue to the past.

Wisdom comes with age and experience.

I had opened a book that could not be closed, started a story that had no obvious conclusion. It was a tale in which I wanted to play no part.

You can never trust the heart of another?

In order to be as effective as possible, we need to consciously design our teams rather than merely allow them to form accidentally or haphazardly.

Love speaks with a false tongue. It kisses you in one ear, then turns with a hiss to bite the other.

He gazed thoughtfully at the piece of fabric in her hand. 'Hope' he said, and gave a little smile. 'A quality I should have thought you already possessed in abundance.

With stable, long-lived teams that own specific bits of the software systems, we can begin to build a stable team API: an API surrounding each team.

A good test for DevEx is how easy it is to onboard a new Developer to the platform.

In many organizations, poorly defined team interactions and responsibilities are a source of friction and ineffectiveness. A team may have been told it is autonomous and self-organizing, but team members find they have to interact with many other teams in order to complete their work; and this feels frustrating. Another team may have responsibility for providing an API or service, but they don't really have the experience to do this effectively.

Site Reliability Engineering is an approach to the operation and improvement of software applications pioneered by Google to deal with their global, multi-million-user systems. If adopted in full, SRE is significantly different from IT operations of the past, due to its focus on the "error budget" (namely defining what is an acceptable amount of downtime) and the ability of SRE teams to push back on poor software.

building and running software systems is a sociotechnical activity, not an assembly line in a factory.

If the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins.

Reorganizations that ignore Conway's law, team cognitive load, and related dynamics risk acting like open heart surgery performed by a child: highly destructive.

We like to think that Team Topologies is another piece of this puzzle—in particular, having clear and fluid team structures, responsibilities, and interaction modes.

Requiring everyone to communicate with everyone else is a recipe for a mess.