Quotes About Risk

Jump. "Not yet." A few more seconds of anticipation, of knowing most of his bones would shatter on contact. He grinned at the thought. The razor-sharp bone shards would cut his injured, swollen organs and those organs would burst like water balloons; his skin would rip from the excess fluid and this time the lifeblood that drained would be his own. Agony, such blissful agony, would consume him. For a little while, anyway.

The tops of her breasts pushed upward, beckoning. Lovely, so lovely. Yet they weren't what claimed his attention. Knives were strapped to every inch of visible skin. Some were twined with the bra's straps. Some were simply taped. With what, he didn't know. He only knew he liked it. A lot. Took him a while, but he finally dropped the last to the floor. He

did he realize he was about to knowingly pair a Harpy with the goddess of Anarchy. Great. He'd be lucky if his head was still attached in the morning.

How do you feel about stealing cars?

She was treading on thin ice—with cleats.

No matter how exciting, new, original, or creative you personally believe your proposal is, always remember that these can be exactly the characteristics people translate to mean risk and unpredictability. Emphasize your proposal's attributes that meet personal needs, not those characteristics that emphasize change and unpredictability.

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.

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

While the redshirts battle to contain the raging engine fire that is threatening the entire ship, the bridge officers continue to cover their asses,

Features are always a gamble. If you're lucky, ten percent will get the desired benefits.

the systems most prone to failure are also our most important and are at the epicenter of our most urgent changes. When

Business agility is not just about raw speed. It's about how good you are at detecting and responding to changes in the market and being able to take larger and more calculated risks.

Much of my career has involved rewrites of critical systems. You would think such a thing is easy—just make the new one do what the old one did. Yet they are always much more complex than they seem, and overflowing with risk. The big cut-over date looms, and the pressure is on. While new features (there are always new features) are liked, old stuff has to remain. Even old bugs often need to be added to the rewritten system.

One of the problems of prevention is that you rarely know about the disasters you averted.

We need to focus on the riskiest changes," I continue. "The 80/20 rule likely applies here: Twenty percent of the changes pose eighty percent of the risk.

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

we are all lifelong learners who must take risks in our daily work.

But that's like throwing gasoline on the fire. Developers are even worse than networking people. Show me a developer who isn't crashing production systems, and I'll show you one who can't fog a mirror.

If we know it's that prone to crashing, why do we need to change it?

If I fail, I'll try to make sure it's in a new and novel way.

This process of applying stress to increase resilience was named antifragility by author and risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

It's not a good sign when they're still attaching parts to the space shuttle at liftoff time.

In technology, our work happens almost entirely within complex systems with a high risk of catastrophic consequences. As

doing the same thing twice will not predictably or necessarily lead to the same result. It is this characteristic that makes static checklists and best practices, while valuable, insufficient to prevent catastrophes from occurring. See