For consumers, the speed of technological progress is magical, because of what’s suddenly become possible: self-driving cars, same-day delivery, movies and television shows streamed to us anywhere, anytime.

As I described in my previous blog post on the key principles to guide a microservices project, the efficiency of the value chain determines costs, affects profit, and ultimately decides whether a business will reach its goals. It becomes very important to know if the changes we apply to the system—for example, the introduction of a microservice to implement a value-chain step—have positive or negative consequences on the overall system.

In my previous two blog posts, I explored two principles that are at the heart of DevOps: systems thinking and amplifying feedback loops. In this post, we’ll discuss the third and final principle, a culture of experimentation and learning, which is the direct and most compelling effect of the first two principles.

There was a whole kerfuffle on Twitter this weekend because someone posted about 10X engineers. I didn’t give it much thought. However, over the weekend, the noise just didn’t seem to stop, which got me thinking about the olden days and where this idea of a 10X engineer came from.