And yet, from a short list of a dozen or so aphorisms (and not clichés), the same mistakes are made over and over again, which is why you hear them over and over again.

Everyone's heard "practice makes perfect" until it's become tired and overused, yet when's the last time you practiced restoring from backups from scratch onto a fresh machine? How sure are you, that there isn't a setting in `/etc` before it's usable in production and isn't in puppet/chef/ansible?

Or practiced failing over by firing up a entirely new cluster in a new AZ (and a new set of AWS keys), and failed over to that?

From this slide deck in particular, "Fight Hero Culture" (slide 6) isn't one that I've managed to take to heart (but I'm working on it), and I still don't like apologizing, especially when I was wrong (slide 11).

You might think about the "cliche" "Empathy is a core value" (slide 13) and think about how you might apply that to your comment.

I hope a video of stories from the actual talk is posted soon!

It's not often you see people suggesting that you apologise. I think that's rare and under-rated advice.

I don't tend to recite my slides, so your prediction that the talk was more insightful was ... insightful.

Each of the slides was accompanied with an anecdote that attempted to both illustrate the point and to provide more background about why I think it is important.

If there was something specific you disagree with, I'd be happy to talk more about it.