Better DEVOPS

The 0800-DEVOPS newsletter started as my personal pet project. At the time, I was eager to learn more about DevOps, so I read a lot of articles and books, dug into Twitter, watched conference talks, and implemented what I learned at my daily job.

One thing that surprised me the most was how open and approachable this DevOps community was. I wanted to learn more about DevOps, and there they were – DevOps practitioners, book authors, podcast hosts, consultants… ready to share their experience and lessons learned.

Regardless that some of them live as much as 8 time zones away, having these conversations with them always felt like we’re in the same room. And it’s pretty amazing having a chance to talk to people that are actually the ones challenging the status quo and driving improvements in modern software delivery. I’m grateful for their time and patience with me in sharing their ideas.

Huge thanks to my guests – the absolute best part of this podcast is hanging out with you:

Sam Newman, Julius Volz, Graeme Rocher, Emily Freeman, Sasha Rosenbaum, Kelsey Hightower, Mary Thengvall, Patrick Kua, Pini Reznik, Tanya Janca, John Allspaw, Mik Kersten, Dave Farley, Alanna Brown, Manuel Pais, Enkelejd Zotaj, Rosalind Radcliffe, Christina Wodtke, Brian Muskoff, Michael Heiß, Courtney Kissler and Nigel Kersten.

The 0800-DEVOPS newsletter is my attempt to pay it forward – to convey their thoughts and our conversations to the rest of the community. If any of these ideas make the slightest impact on the people who are reading the newsletter and listening to the podcast, 0800-DEVOPS has succeeded!

Today, 0800-DEVOPS covers a broad range of topics on technical excellence, organizational transformation and improvements, and productivity. But the main idea remains the same – let’s grow together, work smarter and be better than yesterday. Check out some of the most popular issues of the newsletter.

Running a successful organization is not an easy feat, but Courtney Kissler, a CTO at an e-commerce company Zulily, has some tips and tricks for successful collaboration with consulting companies.

“Creating a meaningful engagement is the goal. The success of the engagement is likely going to lead to even more engagement, inside that company or with other companies. We are all building upon the win-win situation which comes from achieving the outcome. Now, you might argue – that’s great for the company but not for the consultant. I think it’s great for both because you can take a framework that works and extend it to other engagements.”

-Courtney Kissler, CTO at Zulily

Mik Kersten, a CEO at Tasktop, is experienced in delivering software and in leadership positions. Those experiences made him realize that there’s something wrong with the way we deliver software. I spoke with Mik about problems in software delivery today and the disconnection between the Business and the IT many organizations experience.

“The goal of the full-frame is to expose the dynamics of software delivery to a common measurement model that both the technology and the business side can agree on. So, to understand that flow is about the customer. It’s not about how quickly an agile team finishes something but about the time to market for delivering value to a customer that all these flows need to be.”

-Mik Kersten, CEO at Tasktop

Manuel Pais is a co-author of Team Topologies and was our keynote speaker at the QEDx. He gave a talk on playing Tetris and the cognitive load, precisely he made an analogy to software delivery and software operations.

“We can look at the canvas where the Tetris pieces are coming down as a sort of the cognitive load for the team that’s developing the product, the software. We can look at the different pieces as different aspects, different knowledge and different concepts and skills they need to have.”

-Manuel Pais, IT Organizational Consultant at Team Topologies

While I prepare the next issue of the 0800-DEVOPS, check out our archive and enjoy podcasts and interviews with IT thought leaders as well as top IT book recommendations.