Celebrate the launch of Visionaries, Rebels and Machines

Information

• Date: Thursday 17th July 2025
• Time: 18:00 - 21:00
• Location: Container Solutions, 29 Clerkenwell Road, London, EC1M 5RN

Agenda

• 18:00 - 19:00: Meet and greet, enjoy a drink and mingle
• 19:00 - 19.10: Introduction
• 19:10 - 19:30: Reading
• 19:30 - 20:00: Q&A
• 20:00: Book signing + close

About the book

For over 25 years, Container Solutions’ founder, Jamie Dobson, has been building complex, distributed systems, and - more importantly - building teams that build complex and distributed systems. Five years ago, he started to look at the successful teams that Container Solutions helped. A number of patterns emerged.

• Visionaries and rebels: Real success often started with a rebellious leader who ‘conducted’ their engineers like musicians in an orchestra

• Hiring: The rebellious leader often took full responsibility for who joined the orchestra, creating cultures where failure was normalised because failure was the norm
• Day to day management: Once the team was assembled, the leader then did the one thing that taps into unlimited motivation - they removed barriers that stopped engineers doing their jobs

Jamie went back in time from Container Solutions to Netflix, then to Amazon, then to Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, Robert Oppenheimer’s research lab at Los Alamos, and ended up at Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park facility. These patterns of success held true throughout the last 150 years.

Why?

• Systems must fail in development: If not, they will fail catastrophically in production. This explains Netflix’s chaos monkey and the evolutionary prototyping of Edison
• Barriers must be removed: If not, the intrinsically motivated, who are drawn to systems development, will be driven to despair. This is why Bezos screamed, ‘developers are alchemists and must be allowed to do their alchemy’. That was the start of cloud computing as we know it

• Shared information: Oppenheimer argued against compartmentalisation, saying that all minds have to see the whole task to contribute efficiently. This foreshadowed the cross-functional teams that succeeded in the age of the cloud

All of these lessons and the stories they arose from are collected in Visionaries, Rebels and Machines, Jamie’s book tells the story of how new technologies are created from existing ones. Visionaries, Rebels and Machines is a handbook for managers and leaders and an entertaining romp throughout our history.

What the reviewers are saying

"A fascinating look back at the origins of our modern computing environment: how the technology evolved and, perhaps more importantly, how the people involved made it happen." - Steve Freeman

"An eye-opening story that highlights the power of trial and error and how amazing progress can come through failure by learning from it." - Anne Currie

"Jamie Dobson has pulled off the impossible — making the history of computing feel like a heist movie." - Mark Coleman

“More than just a book on tech history, this is an enjoyable journey through the failure-fueled cultures that powered innovation, ultimately leading to cloud and AI." - Daniel Vaughn

“A captivating tale of humanity’s tech evolution - from electrification to AI - told with brilliance and clarity.” - Jan Wiersma

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