Kill It with Fire Quotes

“Scaling an organization before it needs to be scaled has similar consequences to scaling technology before it needs to be scaled. It restricts your future technical choices.”
― Marianne Bellotti, Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems

“One of the benefits of microservices, for example, is that it allows many teams to contribute to the same system independently from one another. Whereas a monolith would require coordination in the form of code reviews—a personal, direct interaction between colleagues—service-oriented architecture scales the same guarantees with process. Engineers document contracts and protocols; automation is applied to ensure that those contracts are not violated, and it prescribes a course of action if they are. For that reason, engineers who want to “jump ahead” and build something with microservices from the beginning often struggle. The level of complexity and abstraction is out of sync with the communication patterns of the organization.”
― Marianne Bellotti, Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems

“The only thing worse than fixing the wrong thing is leaving an attempt to fix the wrong thing unfinished. Half-finished initiatives create confusing, poorly documented, and harder to maintain systems.”
― Marianne Bellotti, Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems

“Legacy modernization projects go better when the individuals contributing to them feel comfortable being autonomous and when they can adapt to challenges and surprises as they present themselves because they understand what the priorities are.”
― Marianne Bellotti, Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems

“As a company iterates to improve a certain characteristic of the product, it ultimately makes the product less desirable for the group of existing customers. Companies do this with the hope that a larger group of new customers will make that loss irrelevant.”
― Marianne Bellotti, Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems

“The simplest and least threatening of failure drills is to restore from backup. Remember, if an organization has never restored from backup, it does not have working backups. Waiting for an actual outage to figure that out is not a safer strategy than running a failure drill at a time you've chosen, supervised by your most experienced engineers.

You can justify any failure test the same way. Is it better to wait for something to fail and hope you have the right resources and expertise at the ready? Or is it better to trigger failure at a time when you can plan resources, expertise, and impact in advance? You don't know that something doesn't work the way you intended it to until you try it.”
― Marianne Bellotti, Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems

“When I left government to go back to the private sector, I discovered that the same techniques that had worked for old systems also worked really well with relatively new systems. I moved to a six-year-old company and did legacy modernization work. Then I moved to a six-month-old company and still did legacy modernization work. At one point, exasperated, I complained to my boss, "Why am I running a legacy modernization on a three-month-old system?" To which he retorted, "Serves you right for not showing up three months ago.”
― Marianne Bellotti, Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems

“Software can have serious bugs and still be wildly successful. Lotus 1-2-3 famously mistook 1900 for a leap year, but it was so popular that versions of Excel to this day have to be programmed to honor that mistake to ensure backward compatibility. And because Excel’s popularity ultimately dwarfed that of Lotus 1-2-3, the bug is now part of the ECMA Office Open XML specification.”
― Marianne Bellotti, Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems