Quotes About Challenges

People are the most difficult thing in the world to change

We found out the Gemini spacesuit was, well, oxygen was flowing to keep me cool as well as to breathe, and it wasn't good enough. My visor got fogged.

Though personal and unique for each person ("take up his cross"), the Way of the Cross means that our spiritual life does not consist solely of victories, miracles, and success stories.

some readers are tempted to ignore the challenges of their own lives and to live completely in the alternative reality of books. This can be dangerous and sinful, a rejection of the real world in which God has placed us.

CIO stands for "Career Is Over.

It's not the upfront capital that kills you, it's the operations and maintenance on the back end.

How in the hell do you support and secure something that's written in Microsoft Access? When

Maybe my group being outsourced wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. I've been in software development for virtually my entire career. I'm used to everyone demanding miracles, expecting the impossible, people changing requirements at the last minute, but, after living through this latest nightmare project, I wonder if it might be time for a change…

But problems, like dog poop left in the rain, rarely get better just by ignoring them.

It's like the free puppy," I continue. "It's not the upfront capital that kills you, it's the operations and maintenance on the back end." Chris cracks up. "Yes, exactly! They'll say, 'The puppy can't quite do everything we need. Can you train it to fly airplanes? It's just a simple matter of coding, right?

Are we playing to win and to establish the technical supremacy we need to keep up with what the business needs, or do we just keep limping along, shackled to things built decades ago, and tell our business leadership to throw in the towel and stop having good ideas?

You know, we're struggling, too. We've never had so many problems hitting our ship dates. My engineers keep getting pulled off of feature development to handle escalations when things break. And deployments keep taking longer and longer. What used to take ten minutes to deploy starts taking an hour. Then a full day, then an entire weekend, then four days. I've even got some deployments that are now taking over a week to complete.

Creating and prioritizing work inside a department is hard. Managing work among departments must be at least ten times more difficult.

problems, like dog poop left in the rain, rarely get better just by ignoring them.

Ah… Now I see it. What can displace planned work? Unplanned work. Of course.

Our auditors, who I've long believed are a force for justice and objectivity, are crapping on me, too?

There were still so many uncertainties. But unlike before, our challenges feel within our ability to understand and conquer. Our goals finally seem achievable. I no longer feel like I am always on my heels, with more and more people piling on, trying to push me over.

It was important to us that for a developer, adding production telemetry didn't feel as difficult as doing a database schema change.

By the 2000's, because of advances in technology and the adoption of Agile principles and practices, the time required to develop new functionality had dropped to weeks or months, but deploying into production would still require weeks or months, often with catastrophic outcomes.

For Phoenix, it takes us three or four weeks for new developers to get builds running on their machine, because we've never assembled the complete list of the gazillion things you need installed in order for it to compile and run. But now all we have to do is check out the virtual machine that Brent and team built, and they're all ready to go.

In 1958, the Fortune 500 tenure was 61 years; now it's only 18 years.

the four types of work: business projects, it Operations projects, changes, and unplanned work.

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

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