The Unicorn Project

we need psychological safety, where it is safe for anyone to talk about problems.

psychological safety was one of the most important factors of great teams: where there was confidence that the team would not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.

“When something goes wrong, we ask ‘what caused the problem,’ not ‘who.’

The leader must constantly model and coach and positively reinforce these desired behaviors every day.

Containers are immutable, unable to be changed after they’re created, so if it works in Dev, it will almost certainly work in Test.

in infrastructure, almost everything you do has a side-effect that mutates the state of something in the environment, making it difficult to isolate and test changes, as well as diagnose problems when things go wrong.

“Every time we have an outage, we’ll be conducting a blameless post-mortem like this one. The spirit and intent of these sessions are to learn from them, chronicling what happened before memories fade. Prevention requires honesty, and honesty requires the absence of fear. Just like Norm Kerth says in the Agile Prime Directive, ‘Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.’

The goal is to enable the people closest to the problem to share what they saw, so we can make our systems safer. The only rule is that you can’t say ‘I should have done X’ or ‘If I had known about that, I would have done Y.’ Hindsight is always perfect. In crises, we never actually know what’s reallyl going on, and we need to prepare for a future where we have an equally imperfect understanding of the world.”

I've found that whenever you have a team of people who are passionately committed to achieving a mission and who have the right skills and abilities, it's dangerous to bet against them, because they'll move heaven and earth to make it happen.

When everyone knows what the goals are, as Erik predicted, teams will self-organize to best achieve those goals.

Now, you need to show Steve and Dick how the future requires creating a dynamic, learning organization where experimentation and learning are a part of everyone’s daily work.

“Speed matters. Or more precisely, lead time from idea to market offering matters,”

“There are two ways to write code: write code so simple there are obviously no bugs in it, or write code so complex that there are no obvious bugs in it.”