IT Revolution

Must listen: The Idealcast with Gene Kim I can't stress just how good this podcast is, all of the guests are excellent. Here's a brief highlight of my favorites: - Michael Nygard, SVP of Enterprise Architecture, Sabre - brilliant breakdowns of how to approach software problems conceptually - Dr Steven Spear - tons of excellent stuff from years of studying Japanese management techniques - Elisabeth Hendrickson - has been studying testing and QA for decades, tons of great insights - Scott Havens - incredible breakdown of the inventory management system of jet.com, acquired by Wal-mart and now powering walmart.com https://itrevolution.com/podcast/

Similar theme, not great literature but still a good, quick read for people who work in tech: The Phoenix Project: https://itrevolution.com/product/the-phoenix-project/

This was a really great article and case study. The problems (and eventual solutions) will be familiar and unsurprising to readers of The Phoenix Project: https://itrevolution.com/the-phoenix-project/

No wonder that one of the DevOps success stories revolves around HP printer drivers and firmware: https://itrevolution.com/the-amazing-devops-transformation-of-the-hp-l…

I'm fulltime Clojure since 2014, and I can't say enough how happy I am. I find a lot of joy, every day, in my work as working with a LISP really fits with how my brain think. The community is great and the language leaks through the people: you'll often find very pragmatic (even conservative) approaches. If you are looking for some more testimonials, look no further than Uncle Bob [0] and Gene Kim [1], but there's several more results online. Lately, I tried to "modernize" a little bit the Clojure course that I used, many years ago, to start, and you can find it at [2]: - [0]: https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2019/08/22/WhyClojure.html - [1]: https://itrevolution.com/love-letter-to-clojure-part-1/ - [2]: https://heliosmaster.github.io/academy/

I think John Willis is one of the "core four" who helped create the term, and he has a good writeup at <https://itrevolution.com/the-convergence-of-devops/>. Here in Austin, one of the leaders in this space that I follow is Ernest Mueller, and his writeup is at <https://theagileadmin.com/what-is-devops/>. There's a reason why Ernest and crew helped create DevOpsDaysAustin, and thankfully for us, he's still one of the key figures behind it.

OP here. Thank you for the kind remarks. Apologies because I can speak only in generalities; the devil is always in the details. As such this opinion, not prescription. I read your description as working through a conundrum of priorities, goals, and outcomes. Perhaps the way is to not get stuck in the weeds of either machines or computers. What outcome(s) matter for the overall system? What measures make sense in service of achieving those outcomes? How will people get feedback about progress in service of the outcomes? I am not suggesting some transplanted management framework (OKRs, I'm looking at you). Rather wondering about the small set of things you can get everyone to buy into and work towards. Decision making should become more tractable --- do the magic numbers even matter in the big picture? They may, if you desire to stay within a certain failure rate and/or error bounds, and it turns out the magic numbers are part of the problem. A thing like this won't be obvious in the beginning, you will to investigate things. Being able to say "hey, our stuff is failing at X rate and it is hurting our product/business in A, B, C ways" should help negotiate with management for the time / resource budget. Sometimes it may not be worth it, and so it may be wiser to drop that battle and focus on other outcomes. The investigation ought to be useful later. I noted Gene Kim's initiative [1] in my post (no affiliation). I feel like that collection of resources will give you much…

For those who haven't followed the story: 2007 - the Clojure programming language is announced by Rich Hickey and gains quite a bit of traction over the next 5 or 6 years. It never becomes a "top 5" language, but it could still today be arguably considered a mainstream language. It's been endorsed as "the best general purpose programming language out there" by "Uncle" Bob Martin[1] (author of Clean Code) and Gene Kim[2] (auther of The Phoenix Project, the seminal DevOps book). The fact that Rich spent two years working on it without pay and without the commercial backing many other languages enjoy is a real testament to his commitment and his vision. A Clojure-related emacs package[3] quotes Rich when it starts a REPL: "Design is about pulling things apart." 2012 - the Datomic database is announced by Rich Hickey's company. The database is praised for its ingenuity and its "time travel" features. It was designed to be deployed anywhere in the beginning, but, over time, it became difficult to deploy outside of AWS environments and even the AWS deployment path was quite cumbersome--the Datomic marketing page used to feature a maze-like diagram of all the AWS-specific features needed to make the thing work (it would be nice to find a link to that picture); I'd think most companies would have trouble digesting that and integrating it into their technology "stack". 2020 - Nubank (a Brazilian fintech backed by at least one US venture firm and a large production user of…

So a while back Gene Kim and a few others wrote up the Devops Audit Defense Kit, which talks about this exact scenario (There's a link in https://itrevolution.com/devops-audit-defense-toolkit/, then see page 12). Gene Kim also wrote the Phoenix Project, which is worth checking out, even if it feels outdated now Essentially, SOX requires separation of duties, it doesn't specify what that separation of duties should look like. That separation of duties control is to reduce the risk than an engineer could deploy unauthorized code. The most common answer is to require an approval prior to deployment at the code review/pull request step, and having automated test suites doing the quality checks. If you do end up having a change approval board, then you want to get most code changes authorized as standard changes. Major product or feature launches would go through the change approval board, but minor features wouldn't need to go through it.

DevOps consultants have existed for years, but they only talk to upper management, like the Six Sigmas before them. This article doesn't really explain The Three Ways that well. I recommend going to the source: https://itrevolution.com/the-three-ways-principles-underpinning-devops… Keep in mind this is only one of several ways of explaining what DevOps is about, as the whole concept evolved over several years. Microservices were old and busted 5 years ago, but like Scrum, the industry pays no notice to broken patterns, only new ones. "Learning" is definitely a higher-order pattern that you have to practice to get good at. Whether it's machine learning, distributed tracing, sliding metric alarms, etc they aren't easy to implement correctly but they can level up the efficiency of dealing with big systems. You're right that simpler systems are best, until a specialized team can work on more complex ones without getting run into the ground.

I agree with OP, and also with the Elm post. But I'd like to point out that there's a hypocrisy at the heart of many popular open source projects. Yes, you're legally allowed to fork, and yes you'll be told to go "fork off" if you annoy the maintainers. But anyone who has the temerity to actually create a fork will be shunned or constantly bombarded with questions about why they're sowing division in the community. My computer can hold multiple incompatible forks without them mutually annihilating. Why can't people's belief systems? Now, such sentiments often come from the peanut gallery rather than the maintainer. But maintainers could help more. When was the last time anyone saw a maintainer thank someone for creating a fork? Forks should be treated more like Andon Cords (https://itrevolution.com/kata). Creating them is an act of bravery, and even if you don't agree with the reasons they are a valuable source of feedback. These are events to be celebrated and encouraged. A fork that doesn't gain traction isn't a 'failure' to be derided, it is a valuable experiment at worst, a negative result that didn't take away energy from other efforts. At best it actually influenced upstream. Everyone should be enormously grateful.

This book is a good riff on "The Goal" but for software manufacturers https://itrevolution.com/product/the-phoenix-project/

The Phoenix Project is basically the same thing, but about software. I also found it more enjoyable to read. https://itrevolution.com/product/the-phoenix-project/

Some interesting approaches that companies are taking around this are described in Matt Parker's book, "A Radical Enterprise" for example, companies being made up of many microenterprises. Once you can break away from many traditional imaginations of what a business is and how it should run there are some interesting possibilities. Very challenging and easy to get wrong though I'd guess. https://itrevolution.com/articles/radical-enterprise-pioneering-the-fu…

Here's my list: https://www.manager-tools.com/podcasts podcast about management https://randsinrepose.com/welcome-to-rands-leadership-slack/ great engineering leadership slack. you can ask questions and learn all kinds of stuff https://ctolunches.com/ groups of engineering leaders meet for lunch, also a great email list https://bookshop.org/p/books/high-output-management-andrew-s-grove/673… classing on management https://itrevolution.com/product/the-phoenix-project/ classic on software throughput, plus a fun read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_Great great business book on what makes a longlasting business http://seriouspony.com/badass-users-the-book always be thinking of how to make your users great. short https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mythical-man-month-the/0201835959… lessons from the 1960s and 1970s about software development and are still relevant today

You might get some insights from reading about the maslach burnout inventory test. Some background / video and context here: https://itrevolution.com/understanding-job-burnout-christina-maslach/

We've been using Sleuth at LaunchDarkly as a single pane of glass for all changes going out into production. The addition of DORA metrics is exciting-- as an engineering leader, Accelerate (https://itrevolution.com/accelerate-book/) is one of the few books I've read where the practices described meet reality. Having a tool track those metrics is a welcome addition. One thing I'm curious about is Sleuth's approach to the "garbage in, garbage out" problem-- if I'm tracking (e.g.) MTTR, I've found that our teams aren't always perfect about tracking the start / end times of an incident. If the data's incorrect, can I modify it in manually?

The Phoenix Project is a software instance of one of these textbooks-as-novels: https://itrevolution.com/book/the-phoenix-project/ https://itrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/files/PhoenixProjectExcerp… And Commitment is about software projects, and is a graphic novel (with a female protagonist!): https://hennyportman.wordpress.com/2016/05/29/review-commitment-novel-… I'm also reminded a bit of Simon Wardley's dialogues with X; these are just a roundabout way of him expressing his thoughts, but because they're structured as a debate, i think he gives himself a bit of unearned authority when he runs rings around his imaginary opponent: https://twitter.com/swardley/status/1082647878349324288

Have you looked at their ticket queue? It could be a matter of work in progress or internal bottlenecks. [0] has a good summary of WIP after the heading titled "Why Do We Need To Visualize IT Work And Control WIP?". TLDR - read the Phoenix Project. [0] https://itrevolution.com/resource-guide-for-the-phoenix-project-kanban…

Deming's work has been highly influential within the DevOps community: https://itrevolution.com/deming-to-devops-part-1/

"The Phoenix Project" references this - when a particular resource (expert) is the only person who can get some task done. Of course that means that person is at or beyond 100% utilization, which means their queue length (or wait time) goes through the roof. Paradoxically, reducing utilization increases productivity/throughput. The section about controlling WIP here [1] illustrates it quite well. [1] https://itrevolution.com/resource-guide-for-the-phoenix-project-kanban…

Development abilities would entail having the ability to take a task, or feature, write code around that task or feature including tests, and then submit a PR. As someone doing the hiring for such things, people looking to get hired seem to have a different view of things. I don't need someone with an advanced degree in CS and mastery of algorithms to produce API endpoints and orchestration bits. As for having software developers handing off their software for someone else to operate, well, that's an anti-pattern that inhibits throughput and software quality. There's quite a bit of data around this topic. I would encourage you to read this book: https://itrevolution.com/book/accelerate/ I'll grant you that it's difficult to get there in a traditional IT org, but once you do get there, the results are glorious.

In Japan they have a name for this.. karōjisatsu.. It literally means suicide from work. I wrote about this about two years ago below. Our industry (IT) could be worse than others due to the different kind of stress it creates. Here's some work/research I have done on this. http://itrevolution.com/karojisatsu/ http://itrevolution.com/karojisatsu-in-plain-english-burnout-is-killin… We have to band together and do something about this plague... @botchagalupe

I was expecting the IT and devops book, The Phoenix Project: http://itrevolution.com/books/phoenix-project-devops-book/

"The Phoenix Project" http://itrevolution.com/books/phoenix-project-devops-book/ is good for understanding Devops and constant refocus on business objectives.

> I hope the people responsible for this disaster, their managers and the QA team were fired. In my business, this sort of mess can sink our company. I hope something very different: I hope they're required to write a thorough post-mortem analysis of what went wrong, and what in their development & testing process led to the failure. And then required to implement improvements to both that would prevent this class of bugs from happening again. Firing people for a mistake is rarely a good idea. It makes them not want to admit mistakes. Firing them for making the same mistake several times and not learning for it -- fire away. c.f., http://itrevolution.com/uncovering-the-devops-improvement-principles-b… and the "blameless post-mortem"

I found Accelerate[0] by Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim has a lot of good analysis on metrics one might use. I think it's important to keep in mind that ultimately a dev is part of team that delivers value for a company, so the metrics one uses needs to take that into account. It can definitely be harder if others in the group (company, team, whatever level you want to consider) are viewing things on a more isolated, individual level, but I think it's in part those isolated, individual level metrics that keep one from viewing the bigger picture and one's role in it. You have to figure out what metrics you can put into place that are meaningful and practical for your given situation. I think Accelerate can provide a good starting point for what those metrics can be. Along with OKRs[1] for goal setting, I think you can find something that works for you. [0]: https://itrevolution.com/book/accelerate/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR

For your convenience here are the URLs from that broken document: http://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_413 http://reventlov.com/advisories/using-the-docker-command-to-root-the-h… http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/Containers… http://opensource.com/business/14/9/security-for-docker https://zeltser.com/security-risks-and-benefits-of-docker-application/ https://benchmarks.cisecurity.org/tools2/docker/CIS_Docker_1.6_Benchma… https://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2522 http://xebia.github.io/cd-with-docker/#/ http://www.schibsted.pl/2015/06/how-we-used-docker-to-deploy-schibsted… http://itrevolution.com/the-three-ways-principles-underpinning-devops/ Most of these will be already in your bookmarks, when you are following docker development. Why was this talk is interesting? Is there a video that shows things that happened that are not reflected in the powerpoint pdf? What was new? BTW the powerpoint document wins the "most annoying document of the week"- award. We have better ways to publish URLs in 2016 than powerpoint. Please use reveal or anything else next time, thanks!