Quotes from Gene Kim

A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders zero beers. Orders 999,999,999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders negative one beer. Orders a 'sfdeljknesv.

provider, parent, spouse, and change agent.

If you don't find problems quickly, you end up finding them months later. By then, the problem is lost in all the other changes that every other developer made, so the link between cause and effect disappears without a trace.

I had called Erik briefly to tell him that I had discovered three of the four categories of work: business projects, internal projects, and changes

Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni.

All the firefighting displaced all the planned work, both projects and changes

Unplanned work

business projects, like Phoenix,

NO! That's not for you! Somehow you'll escape all that waiting and staying. You'll find the bright places where Boom Bands are playing.

Dr. Seuss books, Oh, the Places You'll Go. The book describes the dreaded Waiting Place, where people wait for the fish to bite, wind to fly a kite, for Uncle Jake, for pots to boil, or a better break …

Unlike the other categories of work, unplanned work is recovery work, which almost always takes you away from your goals. That's why it's so important to know where your unplanned work is coming from.

a system where small teams of engineers are able to work productively and independently of each other, with components painstakingly and splendidly isolated from each other, instead of being complected into a giant, ugly, knotty mess.

Studies have shown that practicing five minutes daily is better than practicing once a week for three hours.

There are newborn babies dropped off at church doorsteps with more operating instructions than what they're giving us.

As part of the First Way, you must gain a true understanding of the business system that it operates in.

Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt wrote his seminal book, The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, in 1984. It's a Socratic novel about Alex Rogo, a plant manager who must fix his cost and due date issues in ninety days, or his plant will be shut down.

Lean principles focus on how to create value for the customer through systems thinking by creating constancy of purpose, embracing scientific thinking, creating flow and pull (versus push), assuring quality at the source, leading with humility, and respecting every individual.

Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless, because it will always remain starved, waiting for work from the bottleneck. And any improvements made before the bottleneck merely results in more inventory piling up at the bottleneck.

In tightly coupled and complected systems, it's nearly impossible to change anything, because you can't just change one area of the code, you must change one hundred, or even a thousand, areas of the code. And even the smallest changes can cause wildly unpredictable effects in distant parts of the system, maybe in something you've never even heard of.

the Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work. It is the dynamic that allows us to change and improve how we work, informed by learning. As Sensei Dr. Steven Spear said, 'It is ignorance that is the mother of all problems, and the only thing that can overcome it is learning.

Situations like this only reinforce my deep suspicion of developers: They're often carelessly breaking things and then disappearing, leaving Operations to clean up the mess. The only thing more dangerous than a developer is a developer conspiring with Security. The two working together gives us means, motive, and opportunity.

Your job as vp of it Operations is to ensure the fast, predictable, and uninterrupted flow of planned work that delivers value to the business while minimizing the impact and disruption of unplanned work, so you can provide stable, predictable, and secure it service.

a continuous integration server that is doing code builds and automated tests on Data Hub for every check-in,

In other words, when we conflate deployment and release, it makes it difficult to create accountability for successful outcomes—decoupling these two activities allows us to empower Development and Operations to be responsible for the success of fast and frequent deployments, while enabling product owners to be responsible for the successful business outcomes of the release (i.e., was building and launching the feature worth our time).