Blog Posts and Other Media

Keeping configuration in version control is highly correlated with software delivery performance.

Do you have DevOps-related career questions? Join me Sept 23 for a free Q&A session!

Simply put, SRE is only the operations side of DevOps.

Change is hard. We're more receptive to change when we're facing crisis. How can you change to face a crisis effectively?

Watch my PyConAu 2021 presentation about how I was first introduced to the DevOps principles early in my career, and guidance for your own DevOps journey.

Normally when we think of up-skilling, we think of taking a class. But what if you never use that knowledge? A knowledge option is a tool to reduce this risk.

Sometimes a decision must be made without the necessary information. Deferring commitment is not possible, and some decisions aren't easily reversable. This is where the third option of investing in flexibility comes in.

I relate the story of a single bit gone wrong back in 2006, which launched my career on a new trajectory of root-cause analysis, continuous improvement, and DevOps.

In this article, my goal is to clear up some confusion about “DevOps”, and provide some pointers for those who want to learn more.

Frequently we're faced with a decision where blindly following the principle of decide as late as possible might make our lives more painful. Sometimes we can make a choice that's easy to unmake.

This Lean software development principle of "decide as late as possible" is often criticized as too limiting. And rightly so, to a degree.

Every day we're faced with the option, but not the obligation, to do something. This is one of the concepts behind the concept of "deferring commitment" in Lean software development.

If your application relies on serverless functions, often there's limited opportunity for "from an airplane" work.

By working in smaller iterations, we don't just re-organize our work, we actually reduce the amount of work we do.

If every engineer on your team cannot do _meaningful_ work from an airplane, your development environment is broken.

There's almost always more than one way to do something. What workflow does your team use for CI/CD?

In the debate between planned architecture and short iterations, whose right? Both are right, of course.

Is QA a separate stage in your software development pipeline? This is a "smell", an indicator of deeper problems.