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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gene Kim
Read between
December 3 - December 10, 2019
Punishing failure and “shooting the messenger” only cause people to hide their mistakes, and eventually, all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.
I expect leaders to buffer their people from all the political and bureaucratic insanity, not throw them into it.
Creating software should be a collaborative and conversational endeavor—individuals need to interact with each other to create new knowledge and value for the customer.
Although long hours are sometimes glorified in popular culture, Maxine views them as a symptom of something going very wrong.
Without constant feedback from a centralized build, integration, and test system, they really have no idea what will happen when all their work is merged with everyone else’s.
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.
the three metrics I care most about: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow.
Everyone around here thinks features are important, because they can see them in their app, on the web page, or in the API. But no one seems to realize how important the build process is. Developers cannot be productive without a great build, integration, and test process.
developers need a system where they can get fast and continual feedback on the quality of their work. 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.
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.
A great day is when she’s solving an important business problem. Time flies by because she’s so focused and loving the work. She’s in a state of flow, to the point where it doesn’t feel like work at all.
A bad day is spent banging her head against a monitor, scouring the internet for things she doesn’t even want to learn but needs to in order to solve the problem at hand.
Maybe it’s because when friends do favors for friends, we don’t require them to open a ticket first.
coding is a proficiency that every profession is likely to need in the next decade.
the most important thing is to run your program all the time,”
“One of the really nice things about running your program frequently is that you get to see it running, which is fun, and that’s what programming is all about.”
agility is never free. Over time, without this type of investment, software often becomes more and more difficult to change.
when you have customers, change is a fact of life. A healthy software system is one that you can change at the speed you need, where people can contribute easily, without jumping through hoops.
She is able to build things with focus, flow, and joy. She had fast feedback in her work. People were able to do what they wanted without being dependent on scores of other people.
The job of the bridge crew is to ensure the company strategy is viable, not to remind them of the strategy or to micromanage everyone to death. Their job should be to ensure everyone can get their work done.
How can you create anything of value if you don’t have feedback on how it’s used?
Ward Cunningham in 2003. He said, ‘technical debt is what you feel the next time you want to make a change.’
technical debt, but it usually refers to things we need to clean up, or where we need to create or restore simplicity, so that that we can quickly, confidently, and safely make changes to the system.
decision-making processes or the organizational structure loses locality, forcing even small decisions to be escalated—
‘complexity debt,’
First Ideal of Locality and Simplicity. We need to design things so that we have locality in our systems and the organizations that build them. And we need simplicity in everything we do.
“The Second Ideal is Focus, Flow, and Joy. It’s all about how our daily work feels.
work in small batches, ideally single-piece flow, getting fast and continual feedback on our work? These are the conditions that allow for focus and flow, challenge, learning, discovery, mastering our domain, and even joy.”
The Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work.
The Fourth Ideal is Psychological Safety, where we make it safe to talk about problems, because solving problems requires prevention, which requires honesty, and honesty requires the absence of fear.
the Fifth Ideal is Customer Focus, where we ruthlessly question whether something actually matters to our customers, as in, are they willing to pay us for it or is it only of value to our functional silo?”
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
Software is like a city, constantly undergoing change, needing renovations and repair.
transformational leadership,” Erik says. “It requires understanding the vision of the organization, the intellectual stimulation to question the basic assumptions of how work is performed, inspirational communication, personal recognition, and supportive leadership.
excellence, the ruthless pursuit of perfection, the urgency to achieve the mission, a constant dissatisfaction with the status quo, and a zeal for helping those the organization serves.
Fourth Ideal of Psychological Safety. No one will take risks, experiment, or innovate in a culture of fear, where people are afraid to tell the boss bad news,”
“The Fourth Ideal asserts that we need psychological safety, where it is safe for anyone to talk about problems.
psychological safety was one of the most important factors of great teams: where there was confidence that the team would not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.
“When something goes wrong, we ask ‘what caused the pr...
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Sensei John Allspaw says, every incident is a learning opportunity, an unplanned investment that ...
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Maxine once heard a joke: “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.’”
Relentless optimism,
engineers should be writing code, not filling out forms.
“Bash is the disease you die with, but don’t die of.”
Early in her career, the ratio of UX and designers to developers was 1:70.
great teams doing consumer-oriented products have ratios of 1:6 because it’s that important to create products that people love.
Norm Kerth says in the Agile Prime Directive, ‘Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.’
whenever you have a team of people who are passionately committed to achieving a mission and who have the right skills and abilities, it’s dangerous to bet against them, because they’ll move heaven and earth to make it happen.
If an app looks shabby, they’ll likely won’t use it, let alone open it a second time.
When everyone knows what the goals are, as Erik predicted, teams will self-organize to best achieve those goals.
