Jez Humble
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jezhumble.net
Jez Humble
@jezhumble.net
3.7K followers 120 following 50 posts
Works on my machine! Author of some books on software, SRE, portfolio @ continuousdelivery.com. Previously lecturer @ UC Berkeley, 18F, ThoughtWorks. All tweets fictional. He / him. Ⓥ
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jezhumble.net
Two precepts from an interview with Alan Garner: d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text...
This I got from my grandfather. He was a craftsman, and he gave me two precepts which as a writer I've not been able to get away from. One was always take as long as the job tells you to take, because the job will be there when you are not, and you don't want people to say, what fool did that? So I'm a very slow worker. The other precept was if the other chap can do the job, let him. In other words, do only what is uniquely yours.
October 19, 2025 at 3:55 PM
jezhumble.net
Anyone who wants the full story and context should read @sarahkendzior.bsky.social’s “Hiding in Plain Sight”. Read this excerpt from “Jane Doe v. Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein”
September 9, 2025 at 4:01 AM
jezhumble.net
On another note, we looked at the impact of autonomy, trust, and voice on culture in the 2018 State of DevOps report and the findings echo what Edmondson finds (dora.dev/research/201... pp61-66)
June 15, 2025 at 12:17 AM
jezhumble.net
She has a positive definition too which I think captures some of this
Psychological safety is broadly defined as a climate in which people are comfortable expressing and being themselves. More specifically, when people have psychological safety at work, they feel comfortable sharing concerns and mistakes without fear of embarrassment or retribution. They are confident that they can speak up and won't be humiliated, ignored, or blamed. They know they can ask questions when they are unsure about something. They tend to trust and respect their colleagues. When a work environment has reasonably high psychological safety, good things happen: mistakes are reported quickly so that prompt corrective action can be taken; seamless coordination across groups or departments is enabled, and potentially game-changing ideas for innovation are shared. In short, psychological safety is a crucial source of value creation in organizations operating in a complex, changing environment.
June 14, 2025 at 11:21 PM
jezhumble.net
Reading @patigallardo.bsky.social's review of Team Topologies patricia.no/2025/05/24/t... and she mentions the original research on psychological safety was by amycedmondson.com/psychologica.... I'm now reading Edmondson's book The Fearless Organization. Newsflash from 2018
Psychological safety is not immunity from consequences, nor is it a state of high self-regard. In psychologically safe workplaces, people know they might fail, they might receive performance feedback that says they're not meeting expectations, and they might lose their jobs due to changes in the industry environment or even to a lack of competence in their role. These attributes of the modern workplace are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. But in a psychologically safe workplace, people are not hindered by interpersonal fear. They feel willing and able to take the inherent interpersonal risks of candor. They fear holding back their full participation more than they fear sharing a potentially sensitive, threatening, or wrong idea. The fearless organization is one in which interpersonal fear is minimized so that team and organizational performance can be maximized in a knowledge intensive world. It is not one devoid of anxiety about the future!
June 14, 2025 at 10:28 PM
jezhumble.net
While I’m on the topic of AI agents, I was re-reading the Joel on Software classic “The Law of Leaky Abstractions” and came across this gem. The article has aged well. www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/t...
The law of leaky abstractions means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new code-generation tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-efficient, you hear a lot of people saying “learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time.” Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don’t save us time learning. And all this means that paradoxically, even as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder.
May 3, 2025 at 8:25 PM
jezhumble.net
From a CD point of view, you can think of an AI agent as an ephemeral junior developer. So all the stuff you needed before like a CD pipeline, good test coverage, small changes etc, you still need now, but even more so because per this IBM slide from 1979, a computer can never be held accountable.
May 3, 2025 at 8:18 PM
jezhumble.net
California’s Prop 12, which prohibits the sale of eggs or meat from animals kept in extreme confinement, was just upheld in the Supreme Court. One objection of pork producers was that if this stands, states can make similar regulations on goods sold, like paying workers minimum wage. Let’s goooooo!
The attorney for the pork producers argued that if California’s law were upheld, it would open the door for other states to seek changes that would affect the national economy. For example, they said Oregon could require that products sold there from other states must be made by workers who were paid the state’s higher minimum wage, while Texas might require products sold there be made by only lawful U.S. residents.
May 11, 2023 at 2:55 PM