1/

Thinking about this tweetstorm, one of the issues I’ve run into as an engineering leader is what to call the software engineering stuff that’s “agile” given that the Agile Community(tm) has killed the brand.

2/

And by & large, I’ve taken to call it “DevOps”, because the DevOps community have taken up much of the mantle @KentBeck & the XP community started with. & Kent has independently focused on safe small changes deployed to production. Which is DevOps.
3/

Much of the art here is making changes safe enough to deploy to production continuously. And to do that, we need to design incrementally, test obsessively, take architecture seriously so we decompose dependencies. & we need to automate everything & do it all the time.
4/

It turns out that this is what Kent & @RonJeffries @GeePawHill & many other folks have been nattering on about & being broadly misunderstood. @KentBeck has some brilliant essays (scattered across FB & his site alas) & @GeePawHill has amazing twitter threads on the topic
5/

When you look at *what it takes* to get to the DORA measures that @nicolefv & team write about in Accelerate, the input metrics for the DORA outputs, it’s making small changes safe.
6/

As an engineering leader, I provide training, tools, mentorship, leadership development, vision, etc. to help people learn the skills needed to achieve those output metrics. And most of those skills are what @GeePawHill might call the skills of making.
7/

Unfortunately many of those skills are deeply counterintuitive & much of the work is as much unlearning as learning. For example, there’s an implicit definition of work as writing new code, or even writing code.
8/

Because that’s what engineers love to do, and because there are emotional and sometimes financial incentives to make customer visible functionality, we need to overcorrect sometimes on focusing on the tools of making.
9/

Providing visibility & reward for the people who build the CI/CD tooling or build a deployment pipeline that automates acceptance testing, or figure out how to do AppMesh with Terraform as a module or automates linters & code coverage tools in the pipelines.
10/

Great teams end up spending most of their time building user facing functionality because they build the tools of making and sweat automation, IoT, design, architecture, code quality & test automation. Less successful teams try to write lots of code & get stuck.
11/

Accelerating teams towards that point where they’ve incorporated the habits of investing in the tools of making & designing architectures that decompose change into very small safe increments is a key area of software engineering management.
12/

Rallying these changes under the flag of DevOps has been the most successful way I’ve seen to describe these habits.

END

More from Twitter

The twitter ban on 45 is a victory in some sense for the immediate but a warning in the long term, not on the curtail of free speech but as gesture towards the expansive power commercial tech has on every aspect of our governance and our lives, I don’t quite have the words but-

What I’m trying to get at, is not just that Twitter’s decision allows us to see—in ways that have been obscured—how much control they have over content moderation—

but as @Elinor_Carmi points out “platforms don’t just moderate or filter “content”; they alter what registers to us and our social groups as “social” or as “experience.”
https://t.co/GSByAOoDWg changed

I’m worried that the celebration of Twitter’s intervention on fascist rhetoric-however too little and too late- directs us to desire tech companies enforcement of liberal and democratic procedures rather than towards an investigation of

how they’ve developed computational infrastructures which exceed the power of the nation state, are hollowing out our institutions for frictionless (see removing human contact) optimization and are insufficiently described by neoliberalism
A big part of my tweets are inspired by other people's content.

I bookmark everything that looks interesting and go there when in need of inspiration.

This is a thread-recap of the best-saved tweets from 2020 (for me at least) and what you can steal from each one. 🧵👇


The year chart by @jakobgreenfeld

What to steal: the idea and the design

Create a chart with the key moments of your growth. It's a great reflective exercise for you and it can be a great learning experience for your


Let's collaborate by @aaraalto

What to steal: the idea.

Creating a blank piece of content (could be a sentence, a design, a video...) that your audience can later


Advice to first-time info product creators by @dvassallo

What to steal: the insight

This tweet was one of the sparks for me writing the Twitter Thief ($1,3k revenue says it's good


How to be a better writer by @JamesClear

What to steal: the insight

A world-class writer giving free writing lessons. The tweet is from 2019 but I discovered it this
This is why I'm not a critic of "cancel culture." It's crucial to impose social costs for the breech of key social norms. The lesson of overreaction is that we need to recalibrate judgment to get it right next time, not that we need a lot more bad judgment in the other direction.


Obviously, people will disagree about which norms are important, about how bad it is to violate them, and thus about how severe the social cost ought to be. That's just pluralism, man, and it's good.

It's important to openly talk through these substantive differences, which is why derailing these conversations with hand-waving moral panic about "cancel culture" is obnoxious and illiberal.

Screaming "cancel culture!" when somebody pays a social costs other people have been fighting hard to get others to see as necessary is often just a way to declare, with no argument, that the sanction in question was not only unnecessary but in breach of a more important norm.

It's impossible to uphold social norms without social sanctions, so obviously anti-cancelers are going to want to impose a social cost on people they see as imposing unjustly steep social costs on others.
Here are 20 of my best threads from 2020 covering personal finance, entrepreneurship, economics & finance, investment banking ++ useful resources.

Massively grateful to everyone who took time out to read, comment & share these across the year. I really appreciate you.

[Thread]

1. Breaking-in – study notes, free textbooks & past


2. Breaking-in – the job connector


3. Breaking-in – book smart vs. street


4. Personal Finance – MEGA Property

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MDZS is laden with buddhist references. As a South Asian person, and history buff, it is so interesting to see how Buddhism, which originated from India, migrated, flourished & changed in the context of China. Here's some research (🙏🏼 @starkjeon for CN insight + citations)

1. LWJ’s sword Bichen ‘is likely an abbreviation for the term 躲避红尘 (duǒ bì hóng chén), which can be translated as such: 躲避: shunning or hiding away from 红尘 (worldly affairs; which is a buddhist teaching.) (
https://t.co/zF65W3roJe) (abbrev. TWX)

2. Sandu (三 毒), Jiang Cheng’s sword, refers to the three poisons (triviṣa) in Buddhism; desire (kāma-taṇhā), delusion (bhava-taṇhā) and hatred (vibhava-taṇhā).

These 3 poisons represent the roots of craving (tanha) and are the cause of Dukkha (suffering, pain) and thus result in rebirth.

Interesting that MXTX used this name for one of the characters who suffers, arguably, the worst of these three emotions.

3. The Qian kun purse “乾坤袋 (qián kūn dài) – can be called “Heaven and Earth” Pouch. In Buddhism, Maitreya (मैत्रेय) owns this to store items. It was believed that there was a mythical space inside the bag that could absorb the world.” (TWX)