Quotes from Gene Kim

The First Ideal—Locality and Simplicity The Second Ideal—Focus, Flow, and Joy The Third Ideal—Improvement of Daily Work The Fourth Ideal—Psychological Safety The Fifth Ideal—Customer Focus

Dan Milstein, one of the principal engineers at Hubspot, writes that he begins all blameless post-mortem meetings by saying, "We're trying to prepare for a future where we're as stupid as we are today." In other words, it is not acceptable to have a countermeasure to merely "be more careful" or "be less stupid"— instead, we must design real countermeasures to prevent these errors from happening again.

We can outsource the work but not the responsibility.

But remember, we're doing this so that we can be better prepared for the next crisis, when we will be equally ignorant of entirely new things that are just as important and will be just as obvious in hindsight

Maybe not," I say. "I'll tell you what I do know, though. Every time that we let Brent fix something that none of us can replicate, Brent gets a little smarter, and the entire system gets dumber.

when projects are late, adding more developers not only decreases individual developer productivity but also decreases overall productivity.

delayed because of external commitments made to Wall Street or customers. Then you add a bunch of developers who use up all the time in the schedule, leaving no time for testing or operations deployment. And because no one is willing to slip the deployment date, everyone after Development has to take outrageous and unacceptable shortcuts to hit the date.

little fish learn to be big fish in little ponds.

As Damon Edwards observed, "Without these self-service Operations platforms, the cloud is just Expensive Hosting 2.0.

As Sensei W. Edwards Deming once observed, 'a bad system will beat a good person every time.

preoccupied by work." I start to apologize, but she cuts me off.

For the leader, it no longer means directing and controlling, but guiding, enabling, and removing obstacles.

a deployment pipeline. That's your entire value stream from code check-in to production. That's not an art. That's production. You need to get everything in version control. Everything. Not just the code, but everything required to build the environment. Then you need to automate the entire environment creation process. You need a deployment pipeline where you can create test and production environments, and then deploy code into them, entirely on-demand.

Screwups like the san failure made us miss a Phoenix deliverable, and now we're paying for it.

not complaining. I don't want to wreck

When we have a tightly-coupled architecture, small changes can result in large scale failures. As

if we all want our developers to be productive, they need to be able to perform builds on Day One.

I want to migrate us to MySQL and open-source databases wherever we can, because I'm tired of sending millions of dollars each year to an abusive vendor.

Testing is done in scarce integration test environments, which often require weeks to obtain and configure. The

if your colleague tells you they've decided to quit, it was voluntary. But when someone else tells you they've decided to quit, it was mandatory.

INCREASE THE VISIBILITY OF WORK In order to be able to know if we are making progress toward our goal, it's essential that everyone in the organization knows the current state of work. There are many ways to make the current state visible, but what's most important is that the information we display is up to date, and that we constantly revise what we measure to make sure it's helping us understand progress toward our current target conditions.

Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.' The Third Way is all about ensuring that we're continually putting tension into the system, so that we're continually reinforcing habits and improving something. Resilience engineering tells us that we should routinely inject faults into the system, doing them frequently, to make them less painful.

virtualized environments from Bill's team work as expected, we can go into production one week from Friday." I gape at Chris. He just made up an arbitrary date to go into production, with complete disregard for all the things we need to do before deployment. I have a sudden flashback. In the Marines, we had a ritual for

Because our goal is to enable small teams of developers to independently develop, test, and deploy value to customers quickly and reliably, this is where we want our constraint to be. High performers, regardless of whether an engineer is in Development, QA, Ops, or Infosec, state that their goal is to help maximize developer productivity.