What I learned about pipeline design by doing my laundry

Insight can be found in the strangest places. In this case, a basket of dirty clothes. When my dryer broke and the landlord replaced it with a new model that dried twice the clothes in 2/3 of the time, this simple "outside the bottleneck" optimization wound up lowering the quality of the work output and increasing the cost of my personal laundry pipeline. In this lightning talk I'll start by discussing a simple 4-stage pipeline (for doing my laundry), review the conventional wisdom of pipeline optimization, and discuss the hidden complexity of cost, quality, throughput, and cycle time that must be optimized when balancing pipelines. We'll talk about how these factors apply to CI/CD software delivery pipelines, and apply what I learned from my laundry to Devops workflows.