Thread by @wiredferret

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Measuring Your Trajectory

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: In order to understand our trajetory, we need to understand where we are starting from and where we are going to.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: In the old world, if you made a door lock, you shaped a hunk of metal, shipped it, and never thought about it again. But now your lock calls you every five minutes, and if it doesn’t there’s a problem.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: We need to do things in the new world way, which means personalization for everything, gather extensive customer analytics, and build new channels to communicate both ways.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Leadership systems needed for innovation and rapid delivery include trust, rapid feedback systems, and understanding workflows.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Book recs: Ahead in the Cloud, A Seat at the Table, War and Peace and IT

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Skills: How do you train people to do this. Train existing staffon cloud tech, fund pathfinder teams, but be prepared to pay more to keep the best people after they’re trained!

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Book recc: Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Book reccs: Project to Product, the DevOps Handbook

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Capex (capital expenses, finished software vs Opex (operating expenses, cloud costs) Don’t surprise finance! They need to see how the money is moving.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: What’s the pathway for digital transformation? First speed, then scale, and strategic.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: What are the fundamental metrics for INNOVATION? How do you know you’re going quickly? You don’t add innovation to an organization, you get out of its way. Avoid “innovation theater”.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Measure your time to value to customer. You don’t want months between work and value, because you can’t be responsive. But we’re now working on days, which is competetive. Continuous delivery can mean minutes.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: There is no economy of scale in software. Smaller changes are better. The more you bundle, the more likely you are to break things.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: We want small changes, lots of them, automated continuous delivery, flags and A/B testing, and then rapid build and deploy that gets out to get value to users very rapidly.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: If you move from Java Monoliths to Go Microservices, for example, you’re making the build and deploy faster and leaner.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: If you change one small thing at a time, it’s easier to tell if it breaks, easier to roll back, and easier to measure time to value.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Decouple new code from new features. Incrementally change systemwith many small safe updates. Turn on features for testing and when it works, for everyone

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Ken Beck - Test, Commit, Revert. If a line of code doesn’t pass all testst, your editor deletes it and you have to try again!

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: When I started at Netflix, every single feature was behind a feature flag, and you couldn’t wide-deploy anything until you had a statistically significant test to prove it was better.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Product manager came up with new idea to test, engineering manager was in charge of figuring out the fastest way to make the test work.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: If only 1/3 of your 100 ideas will be an improvement, you still have to test all 100, not just the more likely ones, because you cannot tell, until you test in production, what will actually be an improvement.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: How do we get to smaller changes which make everyone happier? Measure your time to value everywhere. Automate collection and reporting of commit to deploy. Lean to do lots of small things quickly. Don’t try to make everything fast.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Try to do the small things quickly, and accept that some things aren’t appropriate to optimize, but rather to break up the steps.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Measure the cost per deploy and work to reduce it. How many meetings, how many tickets, how many overtime hours? The less a deploy costs, the faster you g

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Book Reccs: Lean Enterprise, Hypothesis-driven Development, Unlearn, The principles of Product Development Flow, and Accelerate.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Fast companies are 440x faster than slow companies

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Learn to do simple things quickly to unblock innovation. You can’t solve all your problems with the same process. Use the one that works for the problem at hand. Focus on observability, security, and scalability.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: The best IT architecture today: Minimalist, messy, inconsistent. Provides guard rails for security, scalability, and observability.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Once you learn to do simple things quickly and repeatably, you need to move tomaking it easier to go faster in your infra. Cloud native architecture gives you a lot of flexibility. Immutable code deploys, elastic scaling, self-service.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Should you use containers or serverless or both? Ask yourself what the user need is.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Rapid development is like building something from a Lego kit, rather than molding and injection-molded plastic. It’s not quite perfect, but it’s extensible and it’s serving the purpose.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: The constraints in an architecture are what teaches you how to move quickly.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: People are using serverless to build rapidly, and then use containers to do more optimization.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Turns out computers don’t work under water, or with mud in them. Datacenters can flood, or burn, or be in earthquakes.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Chris Pinkham: You can’t legislate against failure, focus on fast detection and response.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Book recc: Drift Into Failure - Even if you do everything right at every step, and you may stil get a catastrophic failure as a result.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Book recc: Release It! Circuit breakers and bulkheads as a design pattern

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: We’re moving from disaster recovery -> chaos engineering -> resiliency

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Failures are a systems problem - there is not enough safety margin. It’s not something with a root cause of component or human error.

#TrajectoryCon @adrianco: Cloud provides the automation that leads to chaos engineering. You can’t test reliably and reproducibly without cloud resources. As we build in clouds, we can be more standardized and automated.