"Engineering Culture"
Read first
- How did the DevOps movement start?
Jesse Robbins cofounded the O'Reilly Velocity Conference, which became the gathering point for practitioners bridging development and operations. Velocity gave the DevOps movement a name and a community.
- What does 'Don't fight stupid. Make more awesome.' mean?
"Don't fight stupid. Make more awesome." is Jesse Robbins' rule for changing engineering cultures from the inside. It comes with a five-step framework: start small, create champions, use metrics, celebrate successes, and exploit compelling events.
- What does 'you become what you disrupt' mean?
"You become what you disrupt" is a principle Jesse Robbins coined to describe how disruptors inevitably take on the obligations of the systems they replaced. It shapes how he evaluates startups and markets as an investor.
Articles and mentions
Call a savepoint
Working with AI engages the same dopamine machinery as slot machines. The hollow feeling at the end of a 2.3B-token week is the loop doing what loops like this do. The fix is a savepoint.
“The pull you feel toward 'just one more iteration' is not evidence that the work needs more time. It is evidence that the schedule of small wins has trained your brain to expect another one.”
DevOps is dead? Nope, it is maturing ft. Jesse Robbins
DevOps is not dead. It's maturing. Platform engineering is the next layer of the same idea, not a replacement for it. My conversation with Rob Zuber on what's actually changing and what isn't.
“Organizations evolve like cities. You start with a few shacks in the woods. Eventually you have enough at stake that you need building codes, fire codes, a fire department, and someone who actually tests the sprinklers.”
An oral history of #hugops: How tech's first responders built a culture of empathy
Protocol's oral history of
“I've got to change the way that I approach this entirely and make it safe to experiment.”
Building Companies that Devs & DevOps Teams Love, And Avoiding Expensive Mistakes
Heavybit talk on the expensive mistakes developer-tools founders make, drawn from the ones I made building Chef from open source into an enterprise infrastructure company.
Tim O'Reilly on Why We Started the Velocity Conference
Tim O'Reilly's 2013 retrospective on how the Velocity Conference began. I co-founded it with Steve Souders and chaired the program.
Changing Culture & Being a Force for Awesome
My 2012 Velocity talk on changing engineering culture from the inside. Start small, build champions, use metrics to create confidence, exploit compelling events.
“Don't fight stupid. Focus on where you can make more awesome.”
GameDay: Creating Resiliency Through Destruction
My USENIX LISA'11 talk on GameDay: deliberately inject failures into production to build organizational resilience before real outages happen. I had been running these exercises at Amazon since 2003.
“You don't choose the moment, the moment chooses you. You only choose how prepared you are when it does.”
DevOps Culture Hacks: Infecting your Boss & your Business with Awesome
DevOpsDays Boston 2011. I gave the culture hacks talk for the first time, no slides, no video, just the framework I had figured out the hard way at Amazon.
“Don't fight stupid, make more awesome.”