“Unfortunately for entrepreneurs, the market doesn’t reset next season. The place you sit and the trajectory you are on, can be very, very difficult to change. Shifting expectations from winning to justifying your place in the market, rarely re-instills confidence.”

That applies to everyone!

“For my money, Circuit Paul Ricard has had things right for the last decade. High abrasion run-off. But take it up a notch. Coat the run-off areas in such a high abrasion surface that it will not cause punctures or deflation, but will scrub enough rubber off as to ruin that set of tyres. Put a wheel off, let alone all four, and you’ve got to come in and get them changed.

No more keeping your foot in. No more making up positions. No more taking just a few inches more than you should. Keep it on track, inside the white lines.”

This applies to more than just F1. The environment you set up (whether physical or otherwise) governs what people will do. As Clinton/Deming would (sorta) say: “It is the system, stupid.”

“Not every good engineer makes a good startup engineer.”

I guess that will be counter-intuitive to many, especially those who simply see “resources” instead of “people” and who think engineers are fungible.

“Anomalies are defined not by their own characteristics but in contrast to what is normal.”

“Some do want more out of life, but blame their circumstances on others – their parents or government or spouse or lack of opportunities, but almost never on their own lack of initiative. “

“The vast majority of IT, processing and support behind banking services is delivered in-house with platforms that are highly duplicative across players and offer very little by way of competitive advantage.”

“This transition to turbulence doesn’t happen at the same flow speed for all fluids—more viscous ones can be “kept in line” at higher speeds than runny ones. For flow down a channel or pipe, a quantity called the Reynolds number determines when turbulence appears. Roughly speaking, this encodes the ratio of the flow speed to the viscosity of the fluid. Turbulence develops at high values of the Reynolds number.”

What is the equivalent concept to viscosity in the product development “flow”? Is there one? If you can find an organisational construct that allows product and engineering teams to be more “viscous” then does that mean that they will have a higher flow (i.e. product delivery) rate?

“If we are in a data revolution right now, the computational advance that made it possible was not the ‘discovery’ of Map-Reduce, but instead the realisation that these computing systems can and should be built from relatively cheap, shared-nothing machines (and the real contribution from Google in this area was arguably GFS, not Map-Reduce).”

I think people forget what it was like to be arguing for cheap, shared-nothing machines a decade ago. You were looked on as if you were mad. More than mad. Delusional. It was the talk of crackpots because everyone “knew” how you built “proper” systems. Except they didn’t. On the plus side I got to see what being thought of as a crackpot was like for a decade!

“If it works, it’s a product. If it doesn’t, it’s market research.”

“In the battle between the bear and the alligator, what determines the victor is the terrain.”

In talking to a senior executive at a Fortune 500 company about a promotion to VP that the executive doesn’t want to take because of all that accepting the VP position would require:
Executive: If I say no it will ruin my career
Gerald: But if you say yes it will ruin your life, which is worse?

“The solution that we have in SRE — and it’s worked extremely well — is an error budget. An error budget stems from this basic observation: 100% is the wrong reliability target for basically everything. Perhaps a pacemaker is a good exception! But, in general, for any software service or system you can think of, 100% is not the right reliability target because no user can tell the difference between a system being 100% available and, let’s say, 99.999% available. Because typically there are so many other things that sit in between the user and the software service that you’re running that the marginal difference is lost in the noise of everything else that can go wrong.
If 100% is the wrong reliability target for a system, what, then, is the right reliability target for the system? I propose that’s a product question. It’s not a technical question at all. It’s a question of what will the users be happy with, given how much they’re paying, whether it’s direct or indirect, and what their alternatives are.

The business or the product must establish what the availability target is for the system. Once you’ve done that, one minus the availability target is what we call the error budget; if it’s 99.99% available, that means that it’s 0.01% unavailable. Now we are allowed to have .01% unavailability and this is a budget. We can spend it on anything we want, as long as we don’t overspend it”