Quotes from Gene Kim

To tell the truth is an act of love. To withhold the truth is an act of hate. Or worse, apathy.

Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.

Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system.

A great team doesn't mean that they had the smartest people. What made those teams great is that everyone trusted one another. It can be a powerful thing when that magic dynamic exists.

technical debt' that is not being paid down. It comes from taking shortcuts, which may make sense in the short-term. But like financial debt, the compounding interest costs grow over time. If an organization doesn't pay down its technical debt, every calorie in the organization can be spent just paying interest, in the form of unplanned work.

To tell the truth is an act of love. To withhold the truth is an act of hate. Or worse, apathy.

Something seems wrong in a world where half the e-mail messages sent are urgent. Can everything really be that important?

We need to create a culture that reinforces the value of taking risks and learning from failure and the need for repetition and practice to create mastery.

a 'change' is any activity that is physical, logical, or virtual to applications, databases, operating systems, networks, or hardware that could impact services being delivered.

CIO stands for "Career Is Over.

Unplanned work is what prevents you from doing it. Like matter and antimatter, in the presence of unplanned work, all planned work ignites with incandescent fury, incinerating everything around it.

Practice creates habits, and habits create mastery of any process or skill.

until code is in production, no value is actually being generated, because it's merely WIP stuck in the system.

repetition creates habits, and habits are what enable mastery.

Left unchecked, technical debt will ensure that the only work that gets done is unplanned work!

Resilience engineering tells us that we should routinely inject faults into the system, doing them frequently, to make them less painful.

The only thing more dangerous than a developer is a developer conspiring with Security.

Remember, it goes beyond reducing WIP. Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system.

Ask a programmer to review ten lines of code, he'll find ten issues. Ask him to do five hundred lines, and he'll say it looks good.

we're hearing more lately: something called "DevOps." Maybe everyone attending this party is a form of DevOps, but I suspect it's something much more than that. It's Product Management, Development, IT Operations, and even Information Security all working together and supporting one another.

You get what you design for. Chester, your peer in Development, is spending all his cycles on features, instead of stability, security, scalability, manageability, operability, continuity, and all those other beautiful 'itties.

If you can't out-experiment and beat your competitors in time to market and agility, you are sunk. Features are always a gamble. If you're lucky, ten percent will get the desired benefits. So the faster you can get those features to market and test them, the better off you'll be. Incidentally, you also pay back the business faster for the use of capital, which means the business starts making money faster, too.

Trying to get a Phoenix build going is like playing Legend of Zelda, if it were written by a sadist, forcing her to adventure far and wide to find hidden keys scattered across the kingdom and given only measly clues from uncaring NPCs. But when you finally finish the level, you can't actually play the next level—you have to mail paper coupons to the manufacturer and wait weeks to get the activation codes.

I've learned that while the finance goals are important, they're not the most important. Finance can hit all our objectives, and the company still can fail. After all, the best accounts receivables team on the planet can't save us if we're in the wrong market with the wrong product strategy with an R&D team that can't deliver.