"Amazon"

GeekWire

Q&A: Ex-Amazon 'Master of Disaster' Jesse Robbins on the Power of 'Relentless Optimism' in Startups

GeekWire profiles Jesse Robbins as CEO of Opscode, where his motto 'don't fight stupid, make more awesome' drives a company culture founded on relentless positivity, from firefighting to Amazon to building enterprise software.

“When you're trying to change the way big organizations work, a lot of people say no a lot. Rather than try to fight them, you've got to find a way to make them say yes. Being a force for awesome in the world is finding ways to say yes.”

— Jesse Robbins
ACM Queue

Resilience Engineering: Learning to Embrace Failure

Jesse Robbins (Amazon), Kripa Krishnan (Google), and John Allspaw (Etsy) discuss how they built organizations that deliberately trigger failure to get stronger: powering off data centers, running 96-hour disaster simulations, and transforming blame cultures into learning cultures.

“You can't choose whether or not you're going to have failures — they are going to happen no matter what — but you can choose in many cases when you're going to learn the lessons.”

— Jesse Robbins
O'Reilly Velocity Conference

Changing Culture & Being a Force for Awesome

· Video · 34:28

Jesse Robbins on how to change engineering culture from the inside. Start small, build champions, use metrics to create confidence, and exploit compelling events. The biggest barrier to operational improvement is not technology. It is organizational resistance.

“Don't fight stupid. Focus on where you can make more awesome.”

— Jesse Robbins
▶ YouTube
DevOps Cafe Podcast

DevOps Cafe Episode 19: Jesse Robbins

· Podcast

Jesse Robbins joins Damon Edwards and John Willis on the DevOps Cafe podcast to discuss his path from firefighting to Amazon's Master of Disaster to co-founding Chef and the Velocity Conference.

DevOpsDays

DevOps Culture Hacks: Infecting your Boss & your Business with Awesome

· Talk

The original DevOps culture hacks talk at DevOpsDays Boston 2011. Jesse Robbins shares the formula for changing engineering culture from the inside, drawn from his years as Amazon's Master of Disaster.

“Don't fight stupid, make more awesome.”

— Jesse Robbins
MIT Technology Review

MIT Technology Review TR35: Innovators Under 35

Jesse Robbins named to MIT Technology Review's TR35, their annual list of the world's top innovators under 35, for his work in web operations, cloud computing, and resilience engineering at Amazon.

Venture Hacks

Five Whys: Try to Learn a Dollar's Worth of Lesson for Every One You Spend in Failure

· Quote

Eric Ries quotes Jesse Robbins in his Venture Hacks guide to implementing Five Whys at startups, linking GameDay's failure-as-learning philosophy to lean startup practice.

“Try to learn a dollar's worth of lesson for every one you spend in failure.”

— Jesse Robbins