Topology Quotes

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give ourselves away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms, blandly filled with excrement and heat? To what purpose?

To my wife Marganit and my children Ella Rose and Daniel Adam without whom this book would have been completed two years earlier.

Strange, how a moment of existence can cut so deeply into our being that while ages pass unnoticed, a brief love can structure and define the very topology of our consciousness ever after.

Quantum machine learning promises to discover the optimal network topologies and hyperparameters automatically without human intervention.

Topology is destiny,' he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time.

Time and space were, from Death's point of view, merely things that he'd heard described. When it came to Death, they ticked the box marked Not Applicable. It might help to think of the universe as a rubber sheet, or perhaps not.

Um, right, okay. Have you taken any courses in interspatial manipulation? Probably not, huh?” “Can’t say that I have.” “Space-time topology?” “Nope.” “Transdimensional theory?” Rosemary made an apologetic face. “Aww!” said Kizzy, clasping her hands over her heart. “You’re a physics virgin!

[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing—one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing. ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me.

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (...) To games or needles, to some other person.

There are lots of things I don't understand - say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. -- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest -- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.

Christ Bleeding,” Makin said, staring into the valley below us. “How…” “Topology,” I said. “It’s a kind of magic.

People simply can’t accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just comes along for the ride.

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately—the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person.

It is as if one hemisphere of your brain is perceiving the world as reflected in a mirror. Through a mirror. See? So left becomes right, and all that that implies. And we don’t know yet what that does imply, to see the world reversed like that. Topologically speaking, a left-hand glove is a right-hand glove pulled through infinity.

The Gang of Four may have run multiple systems on a single motherboard, but each had its own distinct topology and they only surfaced one at a time.

Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..." Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said: "Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit." "Love and tensor algebra?" Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming: Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain! Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone. In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face. I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in bound partition never part. For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell? Cancel me not--for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! The product of our scalars is defined! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine. I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!

The neural basis for the self, as I see it, resides with the continuous reactivation of at least two sets of representations. One set concerns representations of key events in an individual's autobiography, on the basis of which a notion of identity can be reconstructed repeatedly, by partial activation in topologically organized sensory maps. ... In brief, the endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizable part of the state of self as I understand it. The second set of representations underlying the neural self consists of the primordial representations of an individual's body ... Of necessity, this encompasses background body states and emotional states. The collective representation of the body constitute the basis for a "concept" of self, much as a collection of representations of shape, size, color, texture, and taste can constitute the basis for the concept of orange.

The ship had always been vast and intricate, its topology as unfathomable as the abandoned subway system of a deserted metropolis. It had been a ship haunted by many ghosts, not all of which were necessarily cybernetic or imaginary. Winds had sighed up and down its kilometres of empty corridors. It was infested with rats, stalked by machines and madmen. It had moods and fevers, like an old house.

Team Topologies provides four fundamental team types—stream-aligned, platform, enabling, and complicated-subsystem—and three core team interaction modes—collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and facilitating.

I know this may sound like an excuse," he said. "But tensor functions in higher differential topology, as exemplified by application of the Gauss-Bonnett Theorem to Todd Polynomials, indicate that cohometric axial rotation in nonadiabatic thermal upwelling can, by random inference derived from translational equilibrium aggregates, array in obverse transitional order the thermodynamic characteristics of a transactional plasma undergoing negative entropy conversions." "Why don't you just shut up," said Hardesty.

Topological anomaly? Topological anomaly? Don’t you mean witchcraft? Don’t you mean the end of civilisation? Don’t you mean some kind of spooky thing that we know nothing, absolutely fucking nothing about, to go with everything else we don’t know?

There is no pre-mapped intellectual topology path leading to truth. Truth is a process of conducting a searching investigatory dialogue with oneself in an attempt to examine and discern the contents of a person’s own mind. Every person must ask himself or herself what is essential in life.

When cognitive load isn’t considered, teams are spread thin trying to cover an excessive amount of responsibilities and domains. Such a team lacks bandwidth to pursue mastery of their trade and struggles with the costs of switching contexts.

Then the applied mathematician comes along and ruins everything by making topology useful.

Fraa Jad took the garment from me and discovered how the fly worked. “Topology is destiny,” he said, and put the drawers on.

Half the time I thought I was awake but then realized reality wasn’t Hausdorff, and what kind of topology was I in anyway if Twinkies were allowed?

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose?

To avoid the too-common trap of building a platform disconnected from the needs of teams, it is essential to ensure that the platform teams have a focus on user experience (UX) and particularly developer experience (DevEx).

With their cell phone, they have access to all people; with GPS, to all places; with the Internet, to all knowledge. They inhabit a topological space of neighborhoods, whereas we lived in a metric space, coordinated by distances.

My earliest memories are of CP4 — that's a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex directions, though the global topology's quite different. But I didn't really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this" — he motioned at the surrounding more-or-less-Euclidean space — for certain special kinds of physics problems. And even most Newtonian mechanics is easier to grasp in a symplectic manifold; having a separate visible coordinate for the position and momentum of every degree of freedom makes things much clearer than when you cram everything together in a single three-dimensional space.

The science of Chaos teaches us that everything is interconnected, but the contemporary developments in neuroscience, getting started with the brain neurons and their multiple connections, reveal the topology of the brain, a miniature of the universal geometry of everything.

Freud does at this point shift ground. He moves from an energetic to a topological model of the psyche. So that there be no contradiction, Freud assigns the pleasure principle to its own agency of the personality. “We know,” Freud reminds us, “that the pleasure principle is proper to a primary method of working on the part of the mental apparatus, but that, from the point of view of the self-preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the external world, it is from the very outset inefficient and even highly dangerous.” That is, the PP is blind. In itself, it is not a tendency but pure automaticity which, with respect to another topos undergoes a mutation by which is “is replaced by the reality principle.” A change in place obviates the contradiction but sets the places into relation by which the PP becomes the reality principle (RP.)

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately—the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose?

Intersections of lines, for example, remain intersections, and the hole in a torus (doughnut) cannot be transformed away. Thus a doughnut may be transformed topologically into a coffee cup (the hole turning into a handle) but never into a pancake. Topology, then, is really a mathematics of relationships, of unchangeable, or “invariant,” patterns.

In South Texas I saw three interesting things. The first was a tiny girl, maybe ten years old, driving in a 1965 Cadillac. She wasn't going very fast, because I passed her, but still she was cruising right along, with her head tilted back and her mouth open and her little hands gripping the wheel. Then I saw an old man walking up the median strip pulling a wooden cross behind him. It was mounted on something like a golf cart with two spoked wheels. I slowed down to read the hand-lettered sign on his chest. JACKSONVILLE FLA OR BUST I had never been to Jacksonville but I knew it was the home of the Gator Bowl and I had heard it was a boom town, taking in an entire county or some such thing. It seemed an odd destination for a religious pilgrim. Penance maybe for some terrible sin, or some bargain he had worked out with God, or maybe just a crazed hiker. I waved and called out to him, wishing him luck, but he was intent on his marching and had no time for idle greetings. His step was brisk and I was convinced he wouldn't bust. The third interesting thing was a convoy of stake-bed trucks all piled high with loose watermelons and cantaloupes. I was amazed. I couldn't believe that the bottom ones weren't crushed under all that weight, exploding and spraying hazardous melon juice onto the highway. One of nature's tricks with curved surfaces. Topology! I had never made it that far in mathematics and engineering studies, and I knew now that I never would, just as I knew that I would never be a navy pilot or a Treasury agent. I made a B in Statics but I was failing in Dynamics when I withdrew from the field. The course I liked best was one called Strength of Materials. Everybody else hated it because of all the tables we had to memorize but I loved it, the sheared beam. I had once tried to explain to Dupree how things fell apart from being pulled and compressed and twisted and bent and sheared but he wouldn't listen. Whenever that kind of thing came up, he would always say - boast, the way those people do - that he had no head for figures and couldn't do things with his hands, slyly suggesting the presence of finer qualities.

The most important part of the platform is that it is built for developers.”21

As Allan Kelly says, “software developers love building platforms and, without strong product management input, will create a bigger platform than needed.

thinking of software architecture as a standalone concept that can be designed in isolation and then implemented by any group of teams is fundamentally wrong.

The purpose of a platform team is to enable stream-aligned teams to deliver work with substantial autonomy. The stream-aligned team maintains full ownership of building, running, and fixing their application in production. The platform team provides internal services to reduce the cognitive load that would be required from stream-aligned teams to develop these underlying services.

to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there’s not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus—a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and numinous aura)—which balcony means that

wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take a bit of getting used to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there’s not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus—a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and

Fast flow requires restricting communication between teams. Team collaboration is important for gray areas of development, where discovery and expertise is needed to make progress. But in areas where execution prevails—not discovery—communication becomes an unnecessary overhead.

In his life of seventy-six years, Euler created enough mathematics to fill seventy-four substantial volumes, the most total pages of any mathematician. By the time all of his work had been published (and new material continued to appear for seventy-nine years after his death) it amounted to a staggering 866 items, including articles and books on the most cutting-edge topics, elementary textbooks, books for the nonscientist, and technical manuals. These figures do not account for the projected fifteen volumes of correspondence and notebooks that are still being compiled.

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately- the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose?

Search engines and social networks are analog computers of unprecedented scale. Information is being encoded (and operated upon) as continuous (and noise-tolerant) variables such as frequencies (of connection or occurrence) and the topology of what connects where, with location being increasingly defined by a fault-tolerant template rather than by an unforgiving numerical address. Pulse-frequency coding for the Internet is one way to describe the working architecture of a search engine, and PageRank for neurons is one way to describe the working architecture of the brain. These computational structures use digital components, but the analog computing being performed by the system as a whole exceeds the complexity of the digital code on which it runs. The model (of the social graph, or of human knowledge) constructs and updates itself.

The mechanistic reason for Gell-Mann Amnesia is the hub-and-spoke topology of the pre-internet information environment. Suppose you were an expert in computer science, another person was an expert on Japan, a third knew about the bond market, and so on. You are spokes that are all connected to the hub (say, The New York Times) but not each other. Each spoke has superior local information, and can falsify NYT reports in their own domain, but has no mechanism for coordinating with other spokes, let alone establishing a superior hub. Until the internet, the blockchain, and the advent of cryptohistory. The long-term consequence of Gell-Mann Amnesia is Gell-Mann America. People know now that we are systematically misled about the present. But at least we live in the present, so we have local information that can falsify many news stories. We do not live in the past, so all we know is that we may be wildly off-base in our understanding of history. There are no people from the past around to give first hand accounts…though we can read their books and sometimes watch their films.

A.N. Kolmogorov and Yasha Sinai had worked out some illuminating mathematics for the way a system's "entropy per unit time" applies to the geometric pictures of surfaces stretching and folding in phase space. The conceptual core of the technique was a matter of drawing some arbitrarily small box around some set of initial conditions, as one might draw a small square on the side of a balloon, then calculating the effect of various expressions or twists on the box. It might stretch in one direction, for example, while remaining narrow in the other. The change in area corresponded to an introduction of uncertainty about the system's past, a gain or loss of information.

Arithmetic and number theory study patterns of number and counting. Geometry studies patterns of shape. Calculus allows us to handle patterns of motion. Logic studies patterns of reasoning. Probability theory deals with patterns of chance. Topology studies patterns of closeness ans position.

We believe that application developers should be able to take advantage of new deployment technologies, like containers, without having to change how they work. Networking is a big part of that. Weave embeds a software defined network at the container level, so that applications and networks automatically share a common topology, and this is a great way to achieve consistency and scale.

VMware ESXi has the ability to detect the physical processor topology as well as the relationships among processor sockets, cores, and the logical processors on those cores. The scheduler then makes use of this information to optimize the placement of VM vCPUs.

Freud’s theory on the topological structure of the psyche, namely the id, ego and superego, provides an answer to my second question, namely the lack of an inhibiting censor, such as a conscience, to prevent the serial killer from acting out his fantasy.

Eric Evans: “Rethinking Topology in Cassandra,” at ApacheCon Europe, November 2012.

Table of Content Chapter 1 - Basic Networking Elements 1) Network Types 2) Network Topologies 3) Network Components A. END DEVICES & MEANS FOR TRANSMISSION B. SWITCH C. ROUTER 4) How can we represent (or “draw”) a network ? 5) How computers communicate over the Internet ? Chapter 2 – Switches, Ethernet and MAC addresses What’s Ethernet ? Chapter 3 – Routers, IPv4 & IPv6 addresses Basic Routing concepts The IPv4 Protocol IPv4 Classes Public IP vs Private IP Configuring an IP address on Windows 7/8/10 The IPv6 Protocol Chapter 4 – TCP, UDP, Ports and Network Applications 1) TCP and UDP 2) Ports 3) Network Applications Chapter 5 - Cisco IOS & Intro to the CLI Introduction to the CLI - Basic Router Configurations LAB #1

Kizzy pressed her lips together with excitement. “You want me to give you a crash course?” “If it’s no trouble, that is.” “Oh, stars and buckets, of course it’s no trouble. I am flattered and you are adorable. Um, right, okay. Have you taken any courses in interspatial manipulation? Probably not, huh?” “Can’t say that I have.” “Space-time topology?” “Nope.” “Transdimensional theory?” Rosemary made an apologetic face. “Aww!” said Kizzy, clasping her hands over her heart. “You’re a physics virgin!

Exponential Backoff was a huge part of the successful functioning of the ALOHAnet beginning in 1971, and in the 1980s it was baked into TCP, becoming a critical part of the Internet. All these decades later, it still is. As one influential paper puts it, “For a transport endpoint embedded in a network of unknown topology and with an unknown, unknowable and constantly changing population of competing conversations, only one scheme has any hope of working—exponential backoff.

Overwhelming: he could do anything he wanted. But the grand sum of anything-at-all was nothing-at-all. The topology of freedom offered no gradients to nudge him, no landmarks to guide him.

الطبولوجي هو شخص لا يميّز بين كعكة (الدونات) وفنجان القهوة

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. There have always been those tasked with the rotation of informational topologies, but throughout most of history they had little to do with increasing its clarity.

If the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins.

Therefore all the things that appear in CLS—network analysis, digital mapping, linear and nonlinear regressions, topic modeling, topology, entropy—are just fancier ways of talking about word frequency changes.

The litmus test for the applicability of a fracture plane: Does the resulting architecture support more autonomous teams (less dependent teams) with reduced cognitive load (less disparate responsibilities)?

A fracture plane is a natural seam in the software system that allows the system to be split easily into two or more parts. This splitting of software is particularly useful with monolithic software.

Helping stream-aligned teams achieve this high rate of flow are enabling teams (which identify impediments and cross-team challenges, and simplify the adoption of new approaches), complicated-subsystem teams (if needed, to bring deep specialist expertise to specific parts of the system), and platform teams (which provide the underlying “substrate” on which stream-aligned teams can build and support software products and services with minimal friction).

Topology] is a purely qualitative subject where quantity is banned. In it two figures are always equivalent if it is possible to pass from one to the other by a continuous deformation, whose mathematical law can be of any sort whatsoever as long as continuity is respected.

Organizations should be viewed as complex and adaptive organisms rather than mechanistic and linear systems. —Naomi Stanford,

Explicitly thinking about cognitive load can be a powerful tool for deciding on team size, assigning responsibilities, and establishing boundaries with other teams.

The Agile, Lean IT, and DevOps movements helped demonstrate the enormous value of smaller, more autonomous teams that were aligned to the flow of business, developing and releasing in small, iterative cycles, and course correcting based on feedback from users.

autonomy, mastery, and purpose,” the three key components of engaged knowledge workers,

The architecture of the system gets cemented in the forms of the teams that develop it. —Ruth Malan, “Conway’s Law” In many organizations, there is a variety of team types and there are even teams taking on multiple roles (e.g., an infrastructure and tooling team).

three different categories of dependency: knowledge, task, and resource

Forming: assembling for the first time Storming: working through initial differences in personality and ways of working Norming: evolving standard ways of working together Performing: reaching a state of high effectiveness

Domains help us think across the board and use common heuristics.

with less context switching and frequent intra-team communication (thanks to a single shared purpose rather than a collection of purposes).

Most teams in a flow-optimized organization should be long-lived, multi-disciplined, stream-aligned teams. These teams take ownership of discrete slices of functionality or certain user outcomes, building strong and lasting relationships with business representatives and other delivery teams.

functional silo

Act and operate as an effective team? ​•​Own part of the software effectively? ​•​Focus on meeting the needs of users? ​•​Reduce unnecessary cognitive load? ​•​Consume and provide software and information to other teams?

To improve total delivery time, we would need to make big changes to our supply chain. Our current fulfillment network had been built to optimize for nearby access to our third-party shippers so we could reliably and cheaply ship products to customers in three to five days. This logistics topology had been convenient for Amazon, but not for the customers who wanted products delivered fast and free.

treating teams as collections of interchangeable individuals that will succeed as long as they follow the “right” process and use the “right” tools,

Systems thinking focuses on optimizing for the whole, looking at the overall flow of work, identifying what the largest bottleneck is today, and eliminating it.

the imbalance between formal organization structures and the way work actually gets done.

organizing team structures to match the architecture they want the system to exhibit rather than expecting teams to follow a mandated architecture design.

Dan Pink’s three elements of intrinsic motivation: autonomy (quashed by constant juggling of requests and priorities from multiple teams), mastery (“jack of all trades, master of none”), and purpose (too many domains of responsibility).

Eyes On, Hands Off

Work information: what the team is working on now, what’s coming next, and overall priorities in the short to medium term

hidden monoliths and coupling in the software-delivery chain.

When organizations do not explicitly think about team structures and patterns of interaction, they encounter unexpected difficulties building and running software systems.

Every part of the software system needs to be owned by exactly one team. This means there should be no shared ownership of components,

When measuring cognitive load, what we really care about is the domain complexity

Does the structure minimize the number of communication paths between teams? . . . Does the structure encourage teams to communicate who wouldn’t otherwise do so?

Organization design and software design are, in practice, two sides of the same coin,

anyone who makes decisions about the shape and placement of engineering teams is strongly influencing the software systems architecture.

mature

However, it is not sufficient to simply choose a team boundary a single time and expect no further changes; instead, organizations must anticipate the need for evolution of team patterns to meet business, organizational, market, technological, and personnel needs.

the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins.

Conway’s law tells us that we need to understand what software architecture is needed before we organize our teams, otherwise the communication paths and incentives in the organization will end up dictating the software architecture.

in the words of Ruth Malan: “if we have managers deciding . . . which services will be built, by which teams, we implicitly have managers deciding on the system architecture.”11

building and running software systems is a sociotechnical activity, not an assembly line in a factory.

Site Reliability Engineering is an approach to the operation and improvement of software applications pioneered by Google to deal with their global, multi-million-user systems. If adopted in full, SRE is significantly different from IT operations of the past, due to its focus on the “error budget” (namely defining what is an acceptable amount of downtime) and the ability of SRE teams to push back on poor software.

By team, we mean a stable grouping of five to nine people who work toward a shared goal as a unit.

Reorganizations that ignore Conway’s law, team cognitive load, and related dynamics risk acting like open heart surgery performed by a child: highly destructive.