Ever say a word 10 times in a row and feel it start to lose its meaning? Try it, say the word “boat” ten times out loud and watch what happens – be sure you are a alone when you try this or you will get funny looks. When your done try it with the […]
My Journey to the Land of DevOps
Welcome to my first installment in a series where I talk about my long transition as an engineer, first from a very traditional waterfall development methodology into a more Agile process, and finally into a true DevOps organization at my current gig at JumpCloud. Who Am I? First, a little background on me. I’m (almost) […]
Operational Overhead – or why hubris is bad.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A guy walks into a meeting and says “We need a system that does something”, and the engineer in the room replies “Oh, we can totally build that”. Most of the punchlines to this joke go “we can totally build it, and now we have to own its […]
My Journey into DevOps
Like many developers, I started my career in a waterfall-based development environment. I was at a very large telecom, working on a product that had been around literally for decades. We’d spend weeks or months in the requirements phase before any code was written. We’d throw the code over the wall after our development period, […]
DevOps Contrarian
I admire and appreciate the ideas of DevOps as a result of living through two decades of working in IT and experiencing the pain of what I would call the “failed state of IT”. The failed state of IT being something inherently broken, something that couldn’t survive on its own, something that eats its budget […]
DevOps and The Goal
Reading, “The Goal” was a pivotal event in my career. More than a decade ago a friend of mine who was an operations professor at Georgia Tech told me it was his favorite book. We were discussing the challenges of getting work done in a corporate environment. I was grumbling about leading a web dev […]
Closing the Deltas Between Development and Production
Who hasn’t heard the classic statements “It works on my machine!” or, “Man that would have been easier with real data!”? In either case, had the development happened in production, problems would have been avoided! Fortunately, in a DevOps world, the walls between production and non-production get broken down making the reality of developing and […]
Zen and The Art Of Infrastructure Maintenance
There’s a famous passage I’ve quoted from time to time when I see someone “stuck” with a problem, flailing potential fixes and solutions wildly in hope that one of them does the trick. “Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.” Just like that. Improper grammar and all, quoted verbatim from Robert Pirsig’s philosophical […]
Docker as a framework for your DevOps culture
If you’re like me and spend a lot of time evaluating new technologies with the goal of “doing more faster” with your engineering organization, then you’re certainly aware of the many choices of DevOps tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt, etc. In my opinion each of these tools is amazing at one piece of the […]
Don’t Be Afraid of the “R” Word
It seems that many people are afraid of the word refactor. I think in many cases, if someone admits they need to refactor, it means they either didn’t do their job right. They either missed requirements, wrote inefficient or buggy code, etc. Alternatively, there is something fundamentally wrong with the product or system. The fact […]