Just In Time Delivery Recently I became a volunteer at Many Rooms to help cook food for disadvantaged people. It’s generally quite a hectic night. We have a limited amount of time and space to prepare and cook a main meal and a desert for 50+ people. There’s a team of 5 to 8 people working on food preparation; cleaning and cutting up vegetables, making sauces, cooking meat and all kinds of things But, as there’s not much time, we have to work quickly and not be a perfectionist.

Observe your customers Recently, my team has been building some automation for another team. This week we’ve run some workshops and received feedback about it. Most of the time they would tell us if something was wrong, didn’t meet their requirements or expectations. However, one of my team observed that when people followed the README.md, they scrolled up and down the file trying to follow the instructions. So he took the initiative to make some adjustments.

Small Batch Sizes I was reading the final chapters of The DevOps Handbook. And I had a flash back to my first job - a paper boy. Every week I would collect large piles of advertising materials, fold them up and deliver them to 200+ houses. It was quite an effort to complete all that work, and I wanted to be efficient. I remember seeing somebody else’s method for folding.