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.
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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.
I might do an \u201cagile\u201d tweet storm to the effect that all the attention is to the least leveraged portions of the value stream. Interest?
— Arien Malec (@amalec) October 26, 2019
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More from Twitter
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
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
Here's roughly how I grew from 0 to 1400 followers in 4 months. pic.twitter.com/NqY54cWXpC
— Jakob Greenfeld (@jakobgreenfeld) December 15, 2020
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
Let's collaborate
— Aaron Aalto (@aaraalto) December 17, 2020
Step 1: Take this image
Step 2: Be creative with it
Step 3: Reply with your creation pic.twitter.com/xCcCShLvdI
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
My advice to first-time info product creators:
— Daniel Vassallo (@dvassallo) July 26, 2020
1. Start with a very small product.
2. Choose a topic you know well that will almost write itself. Avoid doing research.
3. Timebox production to 2 weeks.
4. Charge $10.
5. Promote it!
All the lessons are in #5. Best of luck!
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
How to be a better writer:
— James Clear (@JamesClear) July 5, 2019
-write about what fascinates you
-make one point per sentence
-use stories to make your point
-cut extra words like \u201creally\u201d and \u201cvery\u201d
-read the whole thing out loud
-post publicly (you\u2019ll try harder when you know others will read it)
What else?
Every single critic of "cancel culture" just thinks the wrong people are getting canceled. pic.twitter.com/DDIVccj8zV
— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) February 2, 2021
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.
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
If you have any study notes, past exam papers, quick excel models... anything you feel could help Twitter peeps, post the links below \U0001f4aa\U0001f4aa
— Koshiek Karan (@iamkoshiek) May 29, 2020
2. Breaking-in – the job connector
The interview job connector thread. If you're currently job hunting, please post the industry/role & someone who is already in the field can give you tailored tips ++ share their experiences \U0001f4aa\U0001f3fd\U0001f4aa\U0001f3fd
— Koshiek Karan (@iamkoshiek) December 4, 2020
3. Breaking-in – book smart vs. street
Anyone who has ever worked a corporate job will tell you where you studied means very little.
— Koshiek Karan (@iamkoshiek) August 8, 2020
Education doesn't guarantee ability.
4. Personal Finance – MEGA Property
The Reserve Bank cut the repo rate by 25bps & just like clockwork, the rats who are paid to sell houses are encouraging people to go out & buy
— Koshiek Karan (@iamkoshiek) July 23, 2020
The usual "influencers"/ estate agents/ mortgage brokers/ banks/ loan sharks/ excavator salesmen
Here's a useful MEGA property thread:
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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)