Maria Vargas > Recent Status Updates

Life in it is pretty shitty when it’s so misunderstood and mismanaged. It becomes thankless and frustrating as people realize that they are powerless to change the outcome, like an endlessly repeating horror movie.

We need to create a culture that reinforces the value of taking risks and learning from failure and the need for repetition and practice to create mastery.

Practice creates habits, and habits create mastery of any process or skill.

When you spend all your time firefighting, there’s little time or energy left for planning. When all you do is react, there’s not enough time to do the hard mental work of figuring out whether you can accept new work. So, more projects are crammed onto the plate, with fewer cycles available to each one, which means more bad multitasking, more escalations from poor code, which mean more shortcuts.

A great team doesn’t mean that they had the smartest people. What made those teams great is that everyone trusted one another. It can be a powerful thing when that magic dynamic exists.

Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system. To do that, you need to know what matters to the achievement of the business objectives, whether it’s projects, operations, strategy, compliance with laws and regulations, security, or whatever.

Remember, unplanned work kills your ability to do planned work, so you must always do whatever it takes to eradicate it.

A half hour later, we finally write on the whiteboard: “a ‘change’ is any activity that is physical, logical, or virtual to applications, databases, operating systems, networks, or hardware that could impact services being delivered.”

Not everything is a change 🙄

Something seems wrong in a world where half the e-mail messages sent are urgent. Can everything really be that important?

Information Security is always flashing their badges at people and making urgent demands, regardless of the consequences to the rest of the organization, which is why we don’t invite them to many meetings. The best way to make sure something doesn’t get done is to have them in the room.

FACTS 😂

Situations like this only reinforce my deep suspicion of developers: They’re often carelessly breaking things and then disappearing, leaving Operations to clean up the mess.

Very common also within developers of other teams or even Operations 😩

As the saying goes, if your colleague tells you they’ve decided to quit, it was voluntary. But when someone else tells you they’ve decided to quit, it was mandatory.

Each year, it gets harder. We have to do more with less, to simultaneously maintain competitiveness and reduce costs.

Facts 🙃

There’s nothing like somebody else’s tragedy to take your mind off your own.

And anyway, revenge is like honey: it doesn’t matter how long you leave it, it never goes bad.

There is something very, very wrong with a man who keeps the gun his wife used to kill herself—supposedly—in his office, where he can look at it every day.

🤨🤨🤨

“Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”

After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

The ancient study of alchemy is concerned with making the Sorcerer’s Stone, a legendary substance with astonishing powers. The Stone will transform any metal into pure gold. It also produces the Elixir of Life, which will make the drinker immortal.

So that’s all the buff around that stone

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that.

But from that moment on, Hermione Granger became their friend. There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.

I didn’t know they hated her so much 😂

The secret with blood is speed. You have to soak the fabric in cold water as soon as possible so the stain doesn’t set.

“Hmm,” said a small voice in his ear. “Difficult. Very difficult. Plenty of courage, I see. Not a bad mind either. There’s talent, oh my goodness, yes — and a nice thirst to prove yourself, now that’s interesting. . . . So where shall I put you?”

That sounds so Slytherin but okay 🐍

He couldn’t know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: “To Harry Potter — the boy who lived!”

Some people are a sky full of stars, others are a blanket of cloud. The sky can change with the slightest breeze, but people rarely do. They are what they are.

Life is an invisible cage for birds who don’t learn to see the bars it builds around them. When the door is left open you have to fly.

We’re all built from invisible scars, building blocks of heartbreak, shame, regret, disappointment making us taller, stronger, harder to knock down.

The truth isn’t as valuable as people think. Time with the people you love most is worth so much more than money or truth or doing the right thing.

But people see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear, and think what they want to think.

History has a horrible habit of repeating itself in families, but sometimes the past only becomes clear in the present, when the dust of our decisions has had time to settle.