I delivered a presentation entitled “Tactics to Kickstart Your Journey Toward DevOps” to a great group of DevOpers at the DevOpsDC meetup on September 15, 2015. Thanks for hosting us, LearningObjects, and for the food and beer, Chef and New Relic. As a follow-up, I wanted to provide some resources I mentioned during my talk.
DC Continuous Delivery Presentation Resources
I delivered a presentation entitled “Tactics To Kickstart Your Journey Toward Continuous Delivery” to an awesome group of attendees at the DC Continuous Delivery meetup on August 25, 2015. The back-and-forth was fantastic! That’s probably why I kept going for 90 minutes (sorry if you attended and had plans I impinged on). As a follow-up, I wanted to provide some resources I mentioned during my talk.
Empathy: The DevOps Secret Weapon
Over the last year or two, I have often heard a word used in the DevOps community not usually uttered in IT circles. In fact, outside of the psychology and counseling communities, I don’t hear the word much at all. That word is “empathy”. And the more I learn about DevOps, the more I believe empathy may be the single best tool there is for building bridges and collaboration across boundaries — job #1 when considering a move to DevOps. Using empathy is better than any process, organizational redesign, or automation initiative. Empathy has tremendous power to improve any relationship that matters to you — personal and professional. Whether you’re Dev working with Ops, Ops working with Dev, IT with “the business”, or a parent with your child, everything seems to work better with a healthy dose of empathy thrown into the mix.
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DevOpsDays DC 2015: Debrief
The inaugural DevOpsDays DC is in the books. It took a lot of work from a lot of people and a lot of support from a lot of sponsors to make it happen, but it was so worth it. Here are some observations and conclusions from my perspective as an organizer, sponsor, and attendee.
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3 Tips When You’re Struggling With DevOps
You’ve started down the road of a DevOps transformation, but you’re struggling on the journey. You might not be improving the performance of your teams and organization like you had hoped. You’re probably wondering why and, more importantly, how to get back on track. DevOps transformations are hard. If they were easy, everybody would have already gone through them.
Here are a few tips you can use to get things moving more quickly in the right direction.
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5 Signs You Need DevOps
I’ve talked to a lot of people from a lot of organizations about DevOps. For those who aren’t familiar with DevOps and the benefits it can bring, they often ask, “How do I know if I need DevOps?” I’ve discovered a lot of signs that are good indicators of when an organization could really benefit from going through a DevOps transformation. Here are my top five.
3 Risks of Not Enough Time or Money for DevOps Transformations
The DevOps movement is taking off and many organizations are embarking on their own DevOps transformation. Just look at the talks from the DevOps Enterprise Summit and the latest State of DevOps Report for evidence of this. I’ve had people ask me, “What happens if I don’t devote enough time and money to our DevOps transformation?” Great question. We’re asked to justify budgets and priorities all the time so we need to have good answers. I’ll give you a few answers that might resonate with you.
Resources from DevOps Interview on Federal Tech Talk
I recently did a Federal Tech Talk interview with John Gilroy on Federal News Radio talking about DevOps, a topic I get more and more excited about every day. During the discussion with John, I mentioned a lot of resources that might be helpful for people to learn more about DevOps and how to get started with it.
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What is DevOps?
DevOps is building a ton of momentum in the industry and for good reason. It has a lot of power to make a huge impact on organizations and people and because of that, more and more organizations are going through DevOps transformations.
Despite all of this momentum, I’ve had a lot of people ask me, “What is DevOps?” Truth be told, I’ve asked that same question to a lot of people, too. DevOps is enigmatic in that this simple question has a surprisingly complicated answer. Continue reading
DevOps Enterprise Summit 2014: Debrief
Hot on the heels of attending User Focus 2014, I attended the DevOps Enterprise Summit last week to learn about how the “horses” were applying DevOps practices. The conference was the brainchild of Gene Kim and it brought together a fantastic community of practitioners at all levels in a variety of roles. The premise behind the conference was to showcase how organizations of all shapes, sizes, and types (i.e., the “horses”) are using DevOps practices and getting benefit from those practices. DevOps isn’t just the domain of Etsy, Netflix, Amazon, and Google (i.e., the “unicorns”). The conference more than achieved its purpose.
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