Lessons Learnt

Brief lessons without getting into the details

• “Have a system in place and follow it, don’t just set goals. Then trust the process”
• “Get yourself out of your way”
• “Get yourself out of your business”
• “Stop selling your time, sell a product instead”
• “Have your tasks planed for each day. Then for each task ask ‘Who can I get to do this for me?'”
• “Chaos is scary but full of opportunities”
• “Be scared but do what you have to do anyway”
• “Keep it simple”
• “Nothing scales as well as technical debt, so do keep it simple”
• “Get out of dilemma by asking ‘Which solution will be easier to change/debug later down the line?'”
• “Don’t design a microservice. Start simple… Then evolve it to a microservice only if it makes sense”
• “If a change to a microservice requires changes to other microservices than what you really have is lots of distributed monoliths "
• “If a microservice interacts with a shared database then it’s not a microservice”
• “Take all of your logic out of your config files and into your code”
• “Stop treating CloudFormation (or similar) as code. It ain’t code. It’s configuration”
• “Don’t even think about creating a catch-all config file or template. Be nice to yourself and others”
• “Focus on business value, not on whatever you regard cool tech”
• “Stop getting excited about new DevOps tools. They will all become commodities sooner or later”
• “Yes, managed services are more expensive, if you ignore A) the costs of having an army of people managing the resources you refused to outsource and B) your own time”
• “Stop blaming distance for any poor communication skills among your team. People who can’t work face to face won’t be able to work remotely anyway”
• “Remote and flexible working is here to stay”
• “Stop treating the cloud as your virtual data centre”
• “Start asking ‘Can this be a serverless solution?’ before you start working on it”
• “Stop talking about values and culture. Simply live according to them”
• “Don’t micromanage, don’t get trapped into the infamous illusion of control”
• “Don’t hire based on CVs, pay people to work with you for a week or two, then hire or keep on looking”
• “Stop talking about best practice - think of good versus bad practice instead”