At Container Solutions, we differentiate between leadership and strategic leadership. Both involve inspiring a group with a vision of the future. Both involve connecting a starting point, A, with an endpoint, B. Both have a transformational effect on the leader and group members. The difference lies in the results, which have to be judged objectively. Whereas the leader makes changes, the strategic leader makes adaptive changes, successfully.

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.