Jefferson Girao > Jefferson's Quotes

“Every unmeasured system is assumed to be critical. It is the same as finding a pistol sitting on a table. Assume that it is cocked and loaded.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“The purpose is to make you aware of the myriad ways that mankind can screw up a fine idea while trying to implement it. Don’t be alarmed. This is the raw, sometimes disturbing side of engineering, about which much of humanity has been kept unaware.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion: 10th Anniversary Edition

“The Empire was run by an old, faceless society of criminals. It ran on cheap oil and cheap blood. It smashed its opponents in the name of Peace.”
― Pieter Hintjens, Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution

“In general, software engineering teams and IT departments seemed to be at the mercy of other groups who would negotiate, cajole, intimidate, and overrule even the most defensible and objectively derived plans. Even plans based on thorough analysis and backed by years of historical data were vulnerable. Most teams, which had neither a thorough analysis method nor any historical data, were powerless at the hands of others who would push them to commit to unknown (and often completely unreasonable) deliverables.”
― David J. Anderson, Kanban

“In this context, “focus” doesn’t mean locking our office door, selecting a task to process, and tuning out the world around us until that task is complete. That kind of self-exile is a productivity (fear) reaction—not a kaizen (growth) reaction—to a stressful workload.”
― Jim Benson, Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

“There are two rules of thumb architects follow when decomposing systems. First, ensure that adding a new feature tends to change only one service or a component at a time. This reduces interface churn.6 Second, avoid “chatty” or fine-grained communication between services. Chatty services scale poorly and are harder to impersonate for testing purposes.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“In his revolutionary work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1970, Paulo Freire describes what is still the dominant model of teaching today. In this model, students are viewed as empty “bank accounts” to be filled with knowledge by teachers — not as participants who have a say in what and how they learn. This model is not designed to enable students to learn — especially not to learn to think for themselves — but rather to control the learning process, students’ access to information, and their ability to critically analyze it. In this way, the education system perpetuates existing social structures and power hierarchies.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Such programs fail to recognize that turning innovation or change into an event rather than part of our daily work can never produce significant or lasting results.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“Don’t slow down delivery. Decide, when needed, at the right level. Do it with the right people. Go see for yourself. Only do it if it adds value. Trust and verify.”
― Jez Humble, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean

“The AEC was tasked with promoting world peace and improving the public welfare while developing weapons that could return civilization to low-population Stone Age conditions in a few seconds.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“If you find yourself cornered by a force of Brits who rib you mercilessly about the SL-1 explosion, it is correct to remind them of the British Blue Peacock nuclear weapon, in which the batteries were kept warm by two chickens living in the electronics module aft of the warhead.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“The fact is that the preference for ignorance over even marginal reductions in ignorance is never the moral high ground. If decisions are made under a self-imposed state of higher uncertainty, policy makers (or even businesses like, say, airplane manufacturers) are betting on our lives with a higher chance of erroneous allocation of limited resources. In measurement, as in many other human endeavors, ignorance is not only wasteful but can also be dangerous.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business

“the objection to using stats boils down to nothing more than an irrational fear of numbers causing some to believe math somehow detracts from understanding or appreciation”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business

“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel

“When cognitive load isn’t considered, teams are spread thin trying to cover an excessive amount of responsibilities and domains. Such a team lacks bandwidth to pursue mastery of their trade and struggles with the costs of switching contexts.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow