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Doing DevOps

by Richard Bown

Join my newsletter for regular views and news all about doing effective, essential DevOps. I dive into the human factors that make successful DevOps organizations and the teams and platforms at the heart of your socio-technical systems. From team setup, to maximizing performance through fast flow to tools and techniques.

Featured Post

Friday 8th December - Happiness Engineering

Today's bumper roundup edition includes three posts from the last three weeks. I will attempt to make this newsletter regular on a Friday soon, but I also don't want to make promises I can't keep. Hopefully, every issue gives you something useful, and I would like to keep it that way! Through a tumultuous year in tech that has seen layoffs and turnarounds, the machine keeps on ​moving. What are your plans for 2024? Well advanced or not yet taking shape? After a cautious year, it's too early...
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1 day ago • 3 min read
Friday 8th December - Happiness Engineering

Tuesday 12th November - Fast Flow and Slow Thinking

It's Tuesday in the Netherlands and it's blowing a gale. Last week, I co-organised the first-ever edition of our new Fast Flow Meetup in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Despite some pretty atrocious weather then, we got about 30 like-minded flow enthusiasts into a room to discuss the implications of socio-technical systems and how to do the mysterious thing of enabling "fast flow". So what exactly is "fast flow", and why is it important? So often, despite our tools and processes, we slow down our...
26 days ago • 3 min read
Do We Work in Pipelines?

Friday 3rd November - Do We Work in Pipelines?

We all want to build better software faster and more reliably. Many valuable simple improvements in code practice, design and process are easy to spot from outside the team or organisation but it is always challenging to know what the best thing to work on is day-to-day. External impetuses from consultants, managers, consultant reports or even customers are not always valuable to the delivery process. Why? Because we are told that we want to achieve a pipeline of our activities. We wish to...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Friday 13th October - Why do we do DevOps?

Friday 13th October - Why do we do DevOps?

When we talk about building a DevOps organisation - what do we mean? We don't do all of "this stuff" (waves hand towards a Jira or Azure Devops board) because we want to follow a particular methodology or necessarily use a set of technologies or solutions for our work. We're just trying to understand and improve how we build and deliver software better. Seeing the frameworks and ideas around us as 'solutions' to our problems is tempting. So, for example, picking Scrum or Kanban, or using npm...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Monday 25th September - Talk vs Action

Monday 25th September - Talk vs Action

As software engineers, we spend a lot of time fixing things. We code. We debug. We troubleshoot. I recently had a conversation with someone which went a little like this: me): Do you have any diagrams of this architecture? dev): No, we prefer not to make pictures because they often become quickly outdated. me): But you know the saying "picture is worth a thousand words" right? dev): Yes but we prefer to write things down. me): And those words, are they always the right words and up to...
3 months ago • 2 min read
12th September 2023 - Platform teams in DevOps

12th September 2023 - Platform teams in DevOps

When you need something done to a system that you work with, can you do it for yourself or do you need to ask someone to help you out? The answer to that question depends on your situation: You might not have the knowledge You might not have the access You might not have the time You might not have the inclination But what we do then determines what our colleagues need to do. If we call up somebody else or interrupt their train of thought, are we doing ourselves as an organisation a favour in...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Sunday 27th August - Keeping the Buzz Alive

Sunday 27th August - Keeping the Buzz Alive

Energy is high when we return to the office. Any accumulated stress has been taken from our shoulders, and what might have previously caused us anguish is now mere annoyance. But annoyances mount up. How do we get to the end of September, October, or November without that stress building up again? How can we move through our daily work without feeling like we are accumulating stress? In his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation", Abraham Maslow proposed that human needs build from a...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Sunday 20th August - What Cost Open Source?

Sunday 20th August - What Cost Open Source?

What's the biggest news from the last few weeks? ​Probably the rumbling debate about "what is open source"? This follows from the decision by Hashicorp to take their open source tools towards a Business Source License (as reported in The Register), which has implications for using these 'free' tools. If you've not heard of Hashicorp, you might have heard of Terraform, their (formally 'completely free' to use) Infrastructure as Code tool. Terraform is used by companies, both big and small, to...
4 months ago • 2 min read
Wednesday 26th July - On The Road

Wednesday 26th July - On The Road

It's summer season, and I hope you get to go on holiday and enjoy a few well-deserved days away in a relaxing environment. As I write this, I'm starting to wrap up my work before the summer break. I'm waiting to board a flight to Berlin for the We Are Developers World Congress '23, where I'll present my talk The QUEST for Better Software. I'm on Stage 5, this Friday morning at 10:20 am. If you are in the area, please come down and lend your support! Vacation time is often when we reflect on...
5 months ago • 2 min read
Saturday 15th July - The "Failing" Team

Saturday 15th July - The "Failing" Team

Do you have or know of a 'failing team'? How is this characterised? Is it: Too slow to deliver features Always distracted by production problems High turnover of staff – particularly domain experts or leads or anyone who has been there “too long” Unable to refactor or redesign due to continuous firefighting I've recently experienced a team that was seen to be failing and had the pleasure of being part of it to try and see what we could do to "fix it". The problems ran outside of the scope of...
5 months ago • 2 min read
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