I laugh at people who talk about “exactly-once delivery”
The specs that claim it have been proven wrong.

But we have methods (like idempotency) to do things well.
@mjpt777 #YowLondon Make handover/resumption protocols.
“This is what I thought I sent to you last, did you get it?”
“Here’s what I got from you last, let’s work it out from there”

@mjpt777 #YowLondon

Most scientific research about fun and humor is…
scientific. Not fun, and not humorous.

But it turns out that ducks are the funniest animal.

@holly_cummins #YowLondon There’s something shameful about fun.

This harks back to Puritans, who even banned Christmas because it was fun.

@holly_cummins #YowLondon

85% of data projects fail.
Yikes! How can we do better?

@jessetanderson at #YowLondon “AI is not a strategy.” @jessetanderson #YowLondon

Software is magic because it scales so well.
I can take the output of my brain and scale it to the world.

@KentBeck If we go from Idea to Behavior change to new Idea…
how quickly we can do that depends on the structure.
@kentbeck

SRE teams try to keep toil under 50%.

Only 50% of work that has no enduring value...

@DivineOps #QConSF SREs in the audience? (Dozens of hands)
Experienced SREs? (Like 2.5 hands)

In which @mipsytipsy speaks up about the Engineer<->Manager Pendulum

#QConSF The team deserves someone
who wants to manage people.
who is not bitter about meetings
who is interested in sociotechnical systems and nurturing careers
whose technical skills are strong enough to evaluate their work.

@mipsytipsy #QConSF

How to build reliable systems under unpredictable conditions

@MrBWilms is excited to be at #QConSF :-) Normal testing is happy-path testing.

@MrBWilms #QConSf

We have known how to build software for a while now, and the question is,
Why don’t we?
@bethcodes #Agile2022 I look at SAFe and I see us reinventing Taylorism from first principles.
@bethcodes
#Agile2022

The cycle of no-improvement:
Bad estimates? get better at estimates!
Unclear requirements? get better at requirements!

Most things we deal with as problems are not actual problems.
They’re indications of problems. @WoodyZuill #Agile2022 If you can’t solve the problem, maybe you can overwhelm it.
Focus on what’s good. Make that bigger!

A ten-principle checklist for socio-technical design

by Albert Cherns, quoted by Jackson in Critical Systems Thinking

paraphrased by me, with commentary for software teams 🧵 Compatibility
the process of design is compatible with its objectives. Want democracy? use participative design.

The means match the ends.
You don't get autonomous teams by specifying Scrum.

How to sell your ideas, by Tom Bellinson
hint: expertise and explanations won’t do it.
#AgileAndBeyond Step 1: focus on their win. Find out what it is by asking questions.
if you can’t deliver on THEIR goals, move on. #AgileAndBeyond

How do you take a legacy system toward fast flow of change? @suksr takes us through an evolution
using wholistic approaches including DDD, Wardley Mapping, and Team Topologies #QConLondon The Wardley Map is only part of Wardley Mapping. There’s a whole strategy cycle

from @suksr #QConLondon

Slow means risky. 130000 dev hours in a single weekend deploy

@audunstrand and @trulsjor #QConLondon It’s not about how fast the team can program.
It’s about how fast the team can find solutions to each problem, uncover organizational secrets for how the domain works and should work.

Flow in a software team is a socio-technical property.
Dropping flow comes with downtime, bugs, and other general misery.

from @ntcoding #QConLondon Enforcing the same JIRA workflow doesn’t make developers interchangable.
“It takes me weeks to develop rapport with teammates, months to learn domain and code, a few hours to learn a JIRA workflow.” @ntcoding #QConLondon

This morning at #QConLondon , @glenathan tells a story of an experiment at Circle CI: for this greenfield project, let’s have NO LOGGING. Instead of logs, events! that make traces!

“Events are good logs.”
They’re data-first instead of human-first; they wrap units of work with durations; they can be explored multiple ways

@glenathan #QConLondon

and now what we’ve all been waiting for: @KevlinHenney keynote #QConLondon

“If there’s any probability, even so close to zero it won’t fit in a floating point number, it is not impossible” Representations are never perfect.
“Software development is the creation and maintaining of illusions.”
@KevlinHenney #QConLondon

A deep Java performance talk that I don’t have enough context for, by @PeterLawrey Project Panama is about replacing JNI. Meantime, if you want to share memory between processes cleverly and safely, you can use their chronicle-bytes library. #QConLondon

Opening keynote at #qconlondon today: Sophie Wilson, microprocessor designer en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wi… Moore’s Law was a self-fulfilling prophecy because microprocessor manufacturers set it as their goal to keep up with it.
- Sophie Wilson, #qconlondon

This afternoon at #srecon, Adam Mckaig and Tahia Khan from @datadoghq about the evolution of their metrics backend The high-level architecture looks very familiar to me. The slightly more detailed less so — many parts!

Today at #srecon, @allspaw and @ri_cook give deep insight on real tools, incident timelines, and clumsy automation.
But not in person. 😭 Great tools (as opposed to machines) are near to hand and conform to the person who wields them. Like a hammer, or `top`. Yeah.
They are opinionated, but not prescriptive.

(machines do what they do, and you conform to them)

What can we learn from ALL the incidents?
@courtneynash at @verica_io compiles reports from lots of companies into the VOID: Verica Open Incident Database. #SREcon “Software runs the world, and you run that software.”
#SREcon @courtneynash