Quotes About Systems

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

Show me a developer who isn't crashing production systems, and I'll show you one who can't fog a mirror. Or more likely, is on vacation.

A significant benefit of this is that when production incidents are shown in the same work systems as development work, it will be obvious when ongoing incidents should halt other work, especially when we have a kanban board.

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.

Alarmingly, our most fragile artifacts support either our most important revenue-generating systems or our most critical projects. In other words, the systems most prone to failure are also our most important and are at the epicenter of our most urgent changes. When these changes fail, they jeopardize our most important organizational promises, such as availability to customers, revenue goals, security of customer data, accurate financial reporting, and so forth.

This is the reality of operating complex systems; no single person can see the whole system and understand how all the pieces fit together.

we need to design our systems so that they are continually creating telemetry, widely

Monitoring is so important that our monitoring systems need to be more available and scalable than the systems being monitored.

Having developers share responsibility for the quality of the systems they build not only improves outcomes but also accelerates learning.

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.

Locality in our code is what keeps systems loosely coupled, enabling us to deliver features faster.

Maxine loves coding and she's awesome at it. But she knows that there's something even more important than code: the systems that enable developers to be productive, so that they can write high-quality code quickly and safely, freeing themselves from all the things that prevent them from solving important business problems.

Many psychologists assert that creating systems that cause feelings of powerlessness is one of the most damaging things we can do to fellow human beings—we deprive other people of their ability to control their own outcomes and even create a culture where people are afraid to do the right thing because of fear of punishment, failure, or jeopardizing their livelihood.

Many psychologists assert that creating systems that cause feelings of powerlessness is one of the most damaging things we can do to fellow human beings—we deprive other people of their ability to control their own outcomes and even create a culture where people are afraid to do the right thing because of fear of punishment, failure, or jeopardizing their livelihood. This

build ever-deeper knowledge about how to manage the systems for doing our work, converting inevitable up-front ignorance into knowledge.

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

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. Or more likely, is on vacation.

Sound is the most absorbent medium of all, soaking up histories and philosophical systems and physical surroundings and encoding them in something so slight as a single vocal quaver or icy harpsichord interjection.

Cities are sustained by similar network systems such as roads, railways, and electrical lines that transport people, energy, and resources and whose flow is therefore a manifestation of the metabolism of the city.

Even more challenging and of perhaps greater urgency is the need to understand how to scale organizational structures of increasingly large and complex social organizations such as companies, corporations, cities, and governments, where the underlying principles are typically not well understood because these are continuously evolving complex adaptive systems.

In general, then, a universal characteristic of a complex system is that the whole is greater than, and often significantly different from, the simple linear sum of its parts.

can any of this be sustainable?

TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CITIES

However difficult it is to study nonlinear systems, such systems probably determine the most important features of choice. As one chaos theorist remarked, "nonlinear systems" may be about as extensive as "non-elephant biology."2