DevOps Culture Issue #01

DevOps Culture Magazine

FREE #01

Nicole Forsgren Inside the mind of DORA’s chief scientist

The DevOps Handbook.

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EVERY IT ORGANISATION HAS TWO OPPOSING GOALS, AND SECOND, EVERY COMPANY IS A TECHNOLOGY COMPANY, WHETHER THEY KNOW OR NOT

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ello_ and welcome to Issue 1 of DevOps Culture Magazine.

Firstly we’d like to offer special thanks to Dr. Nicole Forsgren and James Grenning for taking a leap of faith and time out of their busy schedules to give us two great interviews.

We’re interested in the people who use the tools as much as the tools themselves, and this magazine sets out to explode a few myths about the type of people who work in tech. As you’ll see from our features, the world of DevOps doesn’t promote stereotypes – it defies them. You are a wonderfully diverse group of people.

Inside you’ll find news, interviews, features on tooling, lifestyle columns, and (hopefully) a few jokes. It’s hard to capture the full richness of all the people and places but we think we’ve given it a damn good shot. Above all, we want this magazine to be a focal point for people working in the industry – a forum for you to share your stories and experiences. We’re already looking forward to collaborating with you on the next edition.

Until then, jump inside our first edition and take a look around.

We hope you enjoy the ride, and we’d love to hear what you think. feedback@devopsculture.io

Team DOC. <3>

Keep up with all the latest in DOC by following us on social media.

Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll find lots of DevOps news, upcoming events, and sneak previews from our next edition.

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Engine Room

Featured

DOC Issue #01

DR. NICOLE FORSGREN

JAMES GRENNING

EWELINA WILKOSZ

AUBREY STEARN

Co-founder, CEO and Chief

Agile Manifesto co-author,

IT Consultant at Praqma

Entrepreneur, SRE, DevOps

Scientist at DevOps Research

TDD expert and founder of

specialising in CI/CD

leader, coach and speaker

and Assessment (DORA)

Wingman Software

and Jenkins

A day in DevOps: what does

The latest fascinating DevOps

Get the inside scoop on the

Jenkins As Code and the power

yours look like? pg 30

research and much more pg 12

Agile Manifesto pg 32

of open source pg 24

MIKE LONG

MATT WYNNE

DAVID MCKAY

LARS KRUSE

CTO at Praqma

Co-founder at Cucumber,

SRE at Jaumo and DevOps

Serial co-founder, rainmaker

How to avoid getting

BDD expert and co-author of

community organiser

and digital transformer

stuck in the Agile Alignment

The Cucumber Book

What tools would you

A master/apprentice solution to

Trap pg 44

The guide to quitting the city

take to the DevOps desert

the DevOps skills

and taking to the hills pg 52

island? pg 10

shortage pg 26

Special mentions CHRISTI DU TOIT - christidutoit.co.za BILL MCCONKEY - billmcconkey.co.uk

THE BOY FITZ HAMMOND - tbfh.com

CREDITS: The Boy Fitz Hammond -tbfh.com

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WORDS

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Printed by mixam.com. DOC is published by Phable Ltd. 14 Hackwood, Robertsbridge, TN32 5ER, phable.io, yourstory@phable.io Opinions expressed in this magazine may not be our own, but we heartily endorse them – otherwise we wouldn’t be printing them.

For contributions, advertising, stock enquiries, event partners or a general chit chat contact bruce@devopsculture.io or visit devopsculture.io for more info.

Thanks for supporting DOC.

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FRONTEND

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ISSUE #01 2018

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them” -Lemony Snicket 2018 has seen the release of some fantastic books on DevOps. We take a closer look at recent additions to the essential DevOps library and look forward to what we can expect in 2019.

Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations, Nicole Forsgren PhD, Gene Kim and Jez Humble We simply have to start by talking about Accelerate. Prefacing the release of DORA’s 2018 State of DevOps Report, lead author Nicole Forsgren and frequent collaborators Gene Kim and Jez Humble have anthologised the last four years of DORA insights into one neat volume. It’s received wide acclaim from across the world of software and it’s easy to see why. No resource makes the scientific case for DevOps as powerfully as this. Read more about the author in our interview on page 12.

WORDS: Bruce Johnston

The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping your Business Win, Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and John Spafford Five years after its original release, April saw the third edition of Gene Kim’s innovative genre treatment of DevOps in novel form. Can our IT manager hero, Bill, save his department from outsourcing? Will DevOps ride to the rescue? This latest release also includes new research, a new foreword, and a preview of Gene’s next project. If you didn’t pick this one up first time around, you should definitely get your hands on this fantastic edition.

DevOps for the Modern Enterprise: Winning Practices to Transform Legacy IT Organizations, Mirco Hering This book is a must for managers who still see legacy as a barrier to DevOps. It shows how to create the necessary environment for genuine enterprise transformation by adopting the right tools and practices within a larger framework of organisational change.

Drawing on principles from Agile, Lean, and DevOps as well as first-hand examples from the enterprise world, Mirco Hering addresses the different challenges that legacy organisations face as they transform into modern IT departments. Try this if you’re still in doubt about your organisation’s ability to change.

And here’s our pre-buy recommendation for 2019: Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes, John Arundel and Justin Domingus This latest offering f rom publishers O’Reilly promises readers a hands-on lesson in how to build and develop a productionready cloud native application complete with a development environment and deployment pipeline. It’s our hot tip for early next year and you can pre-order now for its release on 28 February 2019.

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FRONTEND PACK YOUR BAGS

DEVOPSCULTURE.IO

Startup City: Stockholm 0nly Silicon Valley produces more unicorn companies per capita than Stockholm. For several years this city has been building a reputation as Scandinavia’s most

W

hen iZettle was bought by PayPal for $2.2bn earlier this year it joined an impressive list of Swedish startup successes that features the likes of Skype, King (Candy Crush), Spotify and Mojang (Minecraft).

And the startup scene here shows no sign of burnout. In a city where the most common occupation is programmer, DOC went looking for more unicorns in the making...

WORDS: Bruce Johnston

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Uniti Founded: 2016 Electric car startup Uniti has been working in collaboration with Siemens to bring a high tech city car to market in early 2019.

The two-seater Uniti One can achieve 186 miles on a 22kWh battery and will emit 75% less carbon than other electric vehicles over its lifecycle. Customers are already convinced – with several months to go before launch, Uniti One has achieved pre-sales of over €50m. Uniti plan to follow up with a five-door model in 2020. If the tech is as good as claimed and early customer faith is rewarded, this could be worth keeping an eye on.

Resolution Games Founded: 2015 Resolution Games looks like an interesting prospect given the fact that one of its founders, Tommy Palm, already has a unicorn on his CV after working on King’s hugely successful Candy Crush Saga. This new venture is developing VR and AR games and has already achieved success with Bait!, a fishing game that has clocked up more than two million downloads.

Investors also like what they see – when Google Ventures started looking for investment opportunities in Europe, Resolution Games was their first play.

CREDITS: © KC Photography - stock.adobe.com

successful startup hub.

ISSUE #01 2018

5 City Facts 1. The Swedish capital is situated on 14 islands, connected by 57 bridges. No matter where you happen to f ind yourself, water will be close by – Stockholm has 96 beaches.

2. The traditional Swedish buffet food smorgasbord originated in Stockholm a few centuries ago.

3. With over 600 rooms, the city’s Royal Palace is the world’s largest still used for its intended purpose.

Karma Founded: 2016 Karma is an app looking to solve the problem of excessive food waste by selling surpluses from food retailers to consumers at reduced prices. The idea behind Karma is to create mutually beneficial partnerships with both food outlets and consumers. By using Karma, restaurants and cafés can reduce their food waste while customers can enjoy good food at knockdown prices. Of course, it’s great for the environment too. Karma intend to scale beyond 100 employees in the next few months having recently secured $12m in Series A funding.

CELLINK Founded: 2016 CELLINK is looking to transform the world of medicine with highly disruptive biotechnology.

Their bioprinting products allow medical researchers to 3D print human organs and tissues for the development of pharmaceuticals and cosmetic products. It is expected that clinical applications will eventually follow. The key innovation driving CELLINK is their bioink – a patent-pending biomaterial that allows human cells to behave in the lab just as they would inside the human body. Investors love what they see – CELLINK’s IPO in 2017 was oversubscribed by 1070%.

Just Arrived Founded: 2016 Just Arrived is an app providing an innovative solution to a relatively new problem in the Swedish labour market. Over the last few years the ongoing refugee crisis has led to a large influx of foreign-born, non-native speaking labour and this app is designed to match these newly arrived skills and competencies with local employers.

Initially set up to welcome refugees and pair them with opportunities, Just Arrived is having a positive effect on social integration as well as being good for business.

It’s currently available in English, Swedish, Farsi and Arabic, with more languages in the pipeline.

4. Stockholm is home to the world’s f irst airplane hostel.

Near Arlanda Airport you’ll f ind a Boeing 747 with an economy class guest house inside.

5. You don’t need any permits to own a boat or small motor vessel.

Furthermore, no license is required to steer a ship and you are even allowed to build your own vessel anywhere on the shore. The people of Stockholm own around 200,000 boats.

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FRONTEND Choices, choices

ISSUE #01 2018

DEVOPSCULTURE.IO

Desert Island Tools

STRANDED: David McKay, @rawkode FROM: social.rawkode.com

3. Terraform I have a love/hate relationship with Terraform.

I love how amazing it can be to safely spin up and modify infrastructure stacks with remote state and locking using GCS/S3 etc. However, many providers fall short of giving you the wide coverage of automation you need (I’m looking at you, Kubernetes!).

That being said, with 0.12 hot off the grill, there’s nothing better.

4. Click Rather than choosing Kubernetes, which I love, I’ve instead opted for a tool that interacts with your Kubernetes cluster.

Click is a relatively unknown tool, but it makes working with your Kubernetes resources an absolute joy.

It gets bonus points as it’s written in Rust.

Welcome to DOC’s desert island. Funnily enough, it has power and great WiFi, but what tools will our guest choose to survive?

David is a Site Reliability Engineer for Jaumo and organiser of several DevOps and Cloud Native events in and around Glasgow. Unfortunately for David, he now finds himself stranded on a desert island! He dropped DOC a message in a bottle describing his five favourite tools.

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1. SaltStack My first pick has to be SaltStack. It is the unassuming champion of configuration management. It doesn’t use SSH as a transport mechanism and its reactor adds a whole new level of automation through beacons and HTTP events. Drop whatever you use now and join the future.

2. Docker It’s no surprise that Docker makes the list. From local development to CI, containers are integral and Docker is the ubiquitous runtime. With enhancements like BuildKit coming down the line, Docker continues to stay ahead of the competition.

5. Grafana All the automation in the world will only get you so far – decent monitoring will take you the rest of the way. There is no better tool for visualising your metrics than Grafana. With public dashboards for most software stacks available to import, there’s no excuse for not having everything you need when the alerts come.

Thank you, David. The DOC rescue team is on the way, right after they f inish their piña coladas

Be seen Get the right eyes on your products, services and job opportunities. Advertising and Advertorial in DevOps Culture is now available. Interested? Please contact sales@devopsculture.io for more information.

devopsculture.io

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Cover Story

The Doctor will see you now:

Inside the Mind of Dr. Nicole Forsgren In the week leading up to the launch of the 2018 State of DevOps Report, DOC’s Bruce Johnston caught up with the report’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, to talk about the latest DevOps news, inequality in tech, and the quest to find the ever-elusive work/life balance.

WORDS: Bruce Johnston

ILLUSTRATION: Christi Du Toit

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Cover Story

t DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), Dr. Nicole Forsgren measures the effectiveness of DevOps and Lean software approaches through meticulous scientific inquiry. This year the annual State of DevOps Report was supplemented by the earlier release of Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, a book Nicole took the lead on with frequent collaborators Jez Humble and Gene Kim. So, what is the current state of DevOps? And what comes next?

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Awesome! I want to start off by asking you about the latest with DORA. What can people expect to find in the 2018 State of DevOps Report?

We’ve got some really exciting things to share!

This year we partnered with Google Cloud – which I think is super exciting – and 15 other incredible sponsors. I think it really shows the commitment that the industry has to understanding how to move organisations and teams forward. Because we all want to know how to get better, how to do transformations well, how to make our technology have <16>

an impact and how to make the work of people better, decrease burnout and make our culture better, right?

Ultimately, we want to know how to make everything feel better so that we can continue to love our work.

It must be great to have so many things we kind of know anecdotally confirmed by solid data?

We have some incredible things in there this year, like how doing cloud the right way is a huge value driver for

companies. If you leverage essential characteristics of cloud computing you’re 23 times more likely to be an elite performer. That’s huge. We’ve also heard for so long that outsourcing is a bad idea – now we’ve got really strong data showing that outsourcing is a huge, huge hurdle. Why? Because it batches up work, forcing high value features to wait for low value features, which upsets the cadence of work too. A great way to address this is to integrate teams

and we see this in the data: high performers are very likely to be working in crossfunctional teams.

The 2018 State of DevOps Report isn’t the only thing you’ve got in print this year – you released Accelerate only a few months ago. Given your past as a college athlete, I wondered if it was perhaps a slightly autobiographical title?

Interestingly we were just chatting with the Google

“Now we’ve got really strong data showing that outsourcing is a huge, huge hurdle. Why? It batches up work, forcing high value features to wait for low value features”

CREDITS: Christi Du Toit - christidutoit.co.za

BJ: Hey, Nicole! So, you’ve been through the wars lately – after I emailed you asking about this interview, literally the next thing I saw was you leaving hospital on Twitter.

NF: Hi! I’m trying to remember what I hurt – was that the photo of my face?

It’s actually not too bad!

I keep telling everyone to remember to wear sunscreen and get any odd spots checked out! I’m expecting to get special powers or something for the scar that’s left, except it has practically disappeared. And I’ve hurt my foot since then! I was an athlete growing up and all through college, and I just kept working out because that’s how I handle stress. I finally made it to the doctor a week or two ago and she was like, “What did you do?!” Apparently I went from regular plantar fasciitis to a torn plantar fascia and “extensive fractures” in my heel. So now I’m in a boot for four to eight weeks.

Thank goodness for modern technology: you can use laser treatments now which cut the healing time in half!

Cover Story

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CREDITS: Christi Du Toit - christidutoit.co.za

Cover Story

“I really like to see everyone chipping in, particularly in the DevOps community. We didn’t see this 10 years ago. There wasn’t always this community of people helping each other out and sharing experiences, successes and failures” team about where that word came from and why we’re using it. “Accelerate” comes up so often when we work with our customers and clients, and when we talk to teams going through transformations. Accelerate is a great word because it’s not just about getting faster, but the rate at which you become faster. And it’s not about getting faster in a crazy, uncontrolled way either – it’s about doing transformation in a good way, effectively and efficiently.

What were you trying to achieve with Accelerate?

It looks like the reaction to it has been really positive so far.

It’s been amazing, I’m so happy! I almost want to say I’m pleasantly surprised because I was worried that putting out a book on research might not be exciting, although it’s exciting for me because I’m a giant nerd! It’s kind of a compilation of the first four

years of the State of DevOps Report, which we initially did in collaboration with Puppet. I had two or three blog posts and we were like, “Let’s just put it all together in one place and put it in a book!” Martin Fowler caught me at a conference one day and he said, “You have to write this stuff up. If you don’t, I will!” I was like, “No one else is writing my book!” So we sat down and wrote it and the response has been fantastic. So many people who I respect have endorsed it: Martin called it the software book of the year, Adrian Cockcroft put it on his top four list for 2018, and Karen Martin was kind enough to write us an endorsement, too.

How many Diet Cokes did it take you to write the book?

Oh, a lot!

You travel very widely and do a lot of speaking, so you’ve seen lots of different DevOps scenes.

What sort of similarities and differences do you see between North America and Europe for example?

In terms of the conferences themselves, in some ways they’re pretty similar. I really like to see everyone chipping in, particularly in the DevOps community. We didn’t see this 10 years ago.

There wasn’t always this community of people helping each other out and sharing experiences, successes and failures. I really love that about the DevOps community. In terms of maturity – and I don’t really like using that word – the European community is a few years behind. The US is probably furthest along, with Canada one or two years behind. EMEA tends to be four to six years behind.

I’d like to get some of your thoughts on equality issues in tech.

Over the course of your career so far have you seen things improving

for women? And where should we be directing our efforts in terms of trying to create a truly equal community for everyone?

I think it might depend on what you mean by improving. We know that the proportion of women in tech has actually been cut in half since the 80s, so we see fewer women working in tech. That needs some help. Some things are getting better, like we tend to see more women in tech in higher ranking positions than previously. I remember early in my career there was this real perception that there were very, very few spots for women in the upper ranks. And because of that it created artificial competition – if I move up I might steal your spot. And that was a real concern for a long time.

That was the experience of women who are now in their early 40s, but I’ve talked to women in their mid30s and they’ve never had that. They’ve mostly had <19>

supportive female peers and mentors. So I think women my age are at this really interesting, unique spot where we’ve seen that shift happen and I think it’s great.

I’ve seen increasing numbers of women only conferences appearing.

What are your thoughts on those? Do you think they are a good idea?

It’s interesting. I’ve never been to Grace Hopper, but I’ve heard mixed results.

Some women love it and find <20>

it unbelievably empowering.

They love the experience of going to a conference that has almost 30,000 women and think it’s incredible.

On the other hand I have a handful of female friends that hate it because the companies and recruiters there take advantage of the space to showcase themselves, so it’s kind of a mixed bag.

Do you have any advice for younger women who are looking for a career

in STEM? What sort of advice would you give them?

That’s really tricky to answer because sometimes I will tell them not to do it and I hate that. Sometimes my answer is simply “Don’t do it!” because tech can still be a toxic community.

Wow, that suggests there is still an enormous amount of work to be done?

In the last year my livelihood has been threatened.

Do you have any advice for guys? On my list I have “Behave like a decent human being” and “Call out bad behaviour” but is there anything else guys should be doing?

One thing that’s super helpful to know is this: we’re all gonna screw up. I screw up on the regular. Don’t panic about it, but apologise.

Just apologise. It’s totally fine.

I wonder if you could share some thoughts about how you see the future of DevOps. Where are things headed in the short/mid term?

We have so much variability.

For example we have some teams at Netflix, Amazon and Google who aren’t really talking about DevOps right now. They’re trying to figure out ways to optimise

CREDITS: Christi Du Toit - christidutoit.co.za

“Lady networks are dope and you would be surprised at the level of connection and prestige that ladies have. Don’t underestimate your ladies!”

I’ve been doxed. And I’m relatively public, I’m relatively safe. I’m incredibly privileged: I’m white and I’m educated. I have a very strong background of work that I can fall back on – I’m in such a safe position relative to so many of my peers. So my first reaction is “don’t” but I hate that answer. A more complete, real answer is that technology also affords so many opportunities and provides pay that most other fields do not. It provides flexibility that most other fields do not. It provides opportunities for growth, learning and challenges that most other fields do not. It’s going to be a challenge, so make sure you have a strong network. Lady networks are dope and you would be surprised at the level of connection and prestige that ladies have. Don’t underestimate your ladies!

Cover Story

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CREDITS: Christi Du Toit - christidutoit.co.za

Cover Story

“The thing that’s on my radar right now is how to deal with our data in ways that are ethical and unbiased. Right now there are people who are still thinking about how to build it faster, but the challenge is that so much is still inherently biased” what they’re already doing right there at the edge of the curve. Then we have companies at the opposite end of the spectrum who are saying, “I’m going to be fine – DevOps isn’t really a thing, it’s just going to be another fad.” They’re doing software development like organisations were doing in the 70s and 80s. It’s just so outdated. We now have

pretty solid data showing that if you don’t make this transformation, you’re going to be in trouble. If you don’t start delivering code faster, when you go down, you go down hard, and you’ll stay down for up to six months.

It’s bad!

Is there any other tech you’ve heard about recently that sounds

especially exciting to you? I’ve been really taken by the whole CRISPR-Cas9 gene sequencing stuff.

Are the futurists right?

Are we headed for a very different world by 2030?

Hmm, I don’t know about that! The thing that’s on my radar right now is how to deal with our data in ways that are ethical

and unbiased. Right now there are people who are still thinking about how to build it faster, but the challenge is that so much is still inherently biased.

All of the training data sets are problematic because we’re dealing with training sets that are used by us.

Microsoft built their AI bot, Tay, who turned into a racist because it was learning from what was on Twitter. So we don’t necessarily want that to learn how to become racist faster! We need to work on what our algorithms look like because our algorithms tend to inherit the biases of the people who build them.

Absolutely. We started by talking about your health, so let’s go full circle. You tweeted recently that your doctors were a bit upset with you for going at life a little too hard. Have you got any intention of slowing down?

As soon as we launch the report I’m heading off on vacation for a couple of weeks. I’m going to find a lovely beach and some amazing food!

Sounds awesome. Enjoy your break and good luck with the launch!

If you want to take a closer look at this year’s State of DevOps report you can f ind it at: cloudplatformonline. com/2018-state-ofdevops.html

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Open Source Goals A new Jenkins As Code plugin has been a real open source success story for Ewelina Wilkosz. But whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the story behind it? Ewelina explains all to DOC...

Ewelina Wilkosz was talking to DOCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Bruce Johnston

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Ewelina Wilkosz

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t started in January 2017 when I was working on my first Jenkins instance using a Jenkins As Code Reference open source project. I didn’t have much experience with Jenkins, so everything was new and introducing any change was stressful. That’s why I loved the Jenkins As Code Reference idea from the beginning – it was a tool that allowed you to configure some parts of Jenkins via configuration files and to restore a previous state of Jenkins if you messed something up. After a fortnight I had it figured out enough to introduce it to a customer, which is when I started discovering issues with it.

CREDITS: Image - Magdalena Kaczmarska

For example, I was introducing improvements in Jenkins As Code Reference, but it was difficult to share them with other people that were using the same tool. We had a situation where separate teams were introducing improvements only for themselves because sharing them was too complicated. Inevitably, this meant people were wasting time introducing the same solutions independently.

I started working with my colleague Andrey to figure out a better solution. How do we make it easy to share the improvements? The problem was that the tool was a Git repo you had to fork in order to use and configuration for each specific Jenkins instance was mixed in with the source code. First we had to separate the “what” from the “how” – the actual source code that was applying the configuration from the configuration files themselves.

We also wanted to make it easier for people to get the tool’s latest version, deciding that a Jenkins plugin was the best way to go. Soon after we started work on it, Andrey discovered that Kohsuke, the creator of Jenkins, was working on a similar solution. We had a look at what he’d done and were able to start implementing our solution on top.

From there either Andrey got talking with people at CloudBees, or they noticed that we had forked Kohsuke’s repository, but we ended up having a meeting with them in Stockholm.

This was followed by an online meeting with Kohsuke and one of his developers,

looked at what he’d done and we couldn’t exactly figure out how it worked. We had another meeting with him, and we admitted we were having trouble, but even he agreed that it’s not the easiest implementation to understand!

Oleg Nenashev then got involved with the project.

He’s another CloudBees employee and Jenkins core maintainter, but he’s contributing to the plugin in his own time. Oleg and Nicolas know the world of open source Jenkins plugins very well, so they knew which channels to use to spread the word about our project. We were also making a noise in our own network

“I find it amazing that people want to spend their free time not only reporting issues, but sharing the solutions too.”

Nicolas. They were really happy that we wanted to put time and money into developing the solution because even though they knew how much it was needed they didn’t really have time to work on it themselves.

But they wanted to help and when Kohsuke presented his ideas for the tool we realised they were exactly the same as ours. Nicolas then created something that was a huge step forward for us. We were planning to provide a dedicated piece of code for each plugin, but Nicolas used some cool Java features to magically detect how and what we could configure in Jenkins and its plugins. We

by organising meetups all around Scandinavia.

Positive feedback and collaboration started coming in from everywhere, especially after Oleg suggested we move the cooperation and communication to Gitter. I’m a big fan of Gitter because it provides that direct connection between the repository and communication channels.

This is when things really started to take off, with people getting involved, creating issues, and commenting.

We now have a core group of about 20 people who regularly contribute, while

a few others also drop in. I find it amazing that people want to spend their free time not only reporting issues, but sharing the solutions too.

Earlier this year CloudBees invited us to an event where we met up with Oleg, Nicolas, Kohsuke and a few others. During the hackathon I presented the history of the plugin and Nicolas gave an explanation of the technical solutions we were working on. Afterwards he suggested we submit our joint presentation to Jenkins World. Our proposal was accepted, so the next stop is San Francisco!

Everyone tells me I’m doing a great job and I get great feedback from so many people I respect. But, as a woman in IT, I still suffer from imposter syndrome.

I kind of think I got lucky, however I’m surrounded by great people and it’s very nice and helpful to hear their positive comments. In that sense I am lucky.

I don’t think I ever imagined that in 18 months we’d get to this stage – I’ve basically lost control and I don’t know what’s happening anymore!

I’m joking, but it’s a proper open source project now.

All kinds of people are just jumping in and introducing new features. That’s a challenge because the contributors are no longer colleagues – everyone just does what they want to do.

It’s quite chaotic, but we still have a shared vision and we’re moving towards it.

Check out the repo and see if you can make a difference: github.com/jenkinsci/ conf iguration-as-codeplugin <25>

CREDITS: Image - Marie Kruse

The Tomor Peopl

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Yipee

rrow le A new company is looking to reinvent the master/apprentice relationship for todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s IT labour market WORDS: Bruce Johnston

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A

t Prolike young software engineers have the opportunity to get to grips with the latest tooling, learn how to add value from day one, and get paid for it along the way.

DOC spoke to founder, Lars Kruse, to discuss the motivation behind this new venture.

Hands up if you’ve heard IT recruiters talking about how hard their job is these days? It’s a common complaint right across the industry. And if you’re growing your own DevOps company it’s likely to be a problem you know first hand: filling DevOps vacancies is becoming an expensive, time-consuming exercise. Failure to find the right people is becoming a barrier to growth – too often the work is there, but there aren’t enough people qualified to do it. The relentless march towards automation seems unstoppable, but a skills shortage is becoming a significant bottleneck in the path of the DevOps juggernaut.

Lack of skills is a problem that Prolike founder, Lars Kruse, has been aware of for several years. “The world is literally being eaten by software,” he explains. “It’s everywhere and every organisation out there is in the process of digitally transforming itself to become a software-run organisation.

But the total amount of software developers in the world is roughly 21 million. Given the pace of the development in IT and software development, this just doesn’t scale at all.”

We used to rely on our colleges and universities to ease labour shortages by producing a yearly crop of freshly qualified graduates. But it’s here we run into a problem with traditional approaches: the pace of change within the industry is far outstripping the curricula currently available in higher education. Graduates can achieve their degree with top marks despite having no knowledge or experience of CI/ CD and DevOps. So where do companies who need these skills go to find fresh blood?

There is a huge number of technologies in IT and software development in use today that didn’t exist five years ago.

The concept of a lifelong education, especially in IT, seems no longer viable – a view Lars agrees with: “There are a lot of reasons why we need a new kind of education. The most important is that the ones we have aren’t contemporary enough. Traditional education, specifically within IT, is simply not adapting fast enough to the emerging technologies and to the rapid change in labour market structure. We’re still offering students lifelong educations in a specialised field. We still have the attitude that an education is meant to last a full life span. We still have a ‘What do you wanna be when you grow up?’ way of thinking. For years they work <28>

in an isolated environment, only interacting with the real world in sporadic internships and occasional guest lectures from industry. More worrying is that they aren’t creating any value while they’re studying.”

But not every traditional approach is dead. Lars sees a potential solution to this skills shortage in the reinvention of the master/apprentice relationship. To develop the Prolike model Lars is drawing on two decades’ worth of software development and consulting experience. It’s given him valuable insights into the types of individuals the industry needs to function in the new paradigm of continuous delivery and automation. His wingman in the Prolike venture, also called Lars, is another computer scientist with 20 years of experience inside the Danish educational system. It’s a partnership that gives them unique insight into what’s required by industry as well as the areas where academia is falling short. “We’re creating an education from our own experiences based on what we know the industry needs.

More importantly, we also know how the young students want to be taught.”

So how does the Prolike model actually work?

According to Lars, it’s straightforward: “We engage with young people who are eager to learn. We call them Yipees - Young Independent Professionals. Then we engage with representatives from industry who are truly ambitions when it comes to utilising new and contemporary technology and who are keen to engage and employ these young padawans. Then we engage our masters, sometimes jokingly referred to as elders. The masters aren’t teachers, but people from our own extensive network of professionals who make themselves available to our Yipees for mentoring, guidance, technological insights and sparring with the Yipees. The Yipees work together on assignments from real people with real needs – sponsors, open source projects, NGOs. Someone, somewhere, is waiting for the work to be done and is looking forward to it because it’ll make their lives easier. This way the Yipees are learning how to deliver value as they develop their skill stack.”

Perhaps the most visionary aspect of the Prolike project is its insistence on an education that goes beyond learning new tooling and methodology. This is a company that aspires to create confident, professional, autonomous young people.

Lars explains: “The Yipees don’t just learn to program software. They also learn to deliver value, to deploy, to build infrastructure, account management, project management, meet deadlines, make presentations – it’s meant to be a wellrounded education.”

The Prolike vision is a bold attempt to reimagine the sort of educational environment that is needed to meet the demands of industry. Will it resolve the recruitment shortfall in DevOps? Time will tell, but as industry continues to demand these skills, we expect to see this type of model repeated elsewhere before long.

Yipee IMAGE: Lars Kruse, the brains behind Prolike

The Prolike vision is a bold attempt to reimagine the sort of educational environment that is needed to meet the demands of industry

CREDITS: Image - Marie Kruse

Prolike is looking for Yipees! Check out prolike.io for more information

ChNeeds a end sell. duyv usdyvus ydv ysuv yus vyusf yu vsfuyv uysf uvys fyuv fsuyv yusfuvy <29>

A Day in DevOps

Aubrey Stearn is a transgender SRE, speaker, team leader and passionate DevOps advocate.

Find out how she manages her work/life balance as a DevOps firefighter...

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CREDITS: ©Timmary, ©Herbivore,

Aubrey Stearn was talking to DOC’s Bruce Johnston

Aubrey Stearn

I

f I can just get myself ready and onto the train, then breakfast will be fed to me. That’s how I see the morning. I have to get up early, but that’s just how it is when work is in London and home is in Birmingham. I used to have a lot more time in the morning, but as a girl you’ve got to do make-up, faff around with hair, clothes – all that stuff. It adds a solid hour to the routine.

The commute to London is about 1 hour 20 minutes. It’s great that most workplaces are flexible and rocking up at 10am is fine. The days can be quite long though – coming back at 7pm or 8pm is tiring. If I’ve got a meetup after work, they usually finish around 9pm, meaning it’ll be well after 10pm before I’m home. It could be as late as 2am if I stay for drinks. I’ve been in Birmingham for about 10 years but the plan is to move back to London next year – with the meetups and socials it just makes more sense.

I tend to work on a contractual basis so I’ll generally be SRE firefighting or working to build capability. As the contract winds down I’ll replace myself with someone who can take over my responsibilities. Usually I’ll have a job title along the lines of Interim DevOps Team Lead, but you could just as easily call me a DevOps Mercenary. Just show me where the fire is!

where it takes two or three days to get it out. It’s always nice to finish up in the afternoon by walking away with a win – it gives everyone something solid to commit to and accomplish.

We’ll also have an overarching storyline that runs for the week, so by Friday we’re looking to have told a bigger, more complete story.

If I’m not on a contract I might be speaking at a conference or an event. I started in September 2017 and it was terrifying.

I try to telegraph my gender as much as possible, but my voice sucks – there’s nothing you can do about the voice.

Instead of using it as a crutch I decided to get on stage and speak in front of as many people as possible to get it over with. People seemed to like the content, so I’ve done lots more since and gained confidence.

At the moment I’m working to get my BMI down to prepare for upcoming surgeries. I go to the gym both in the morning and evening, which is really hard. I used to cage fight in east London, so I’m accustomed to training at a certain level and seeing results, but with oestrogen you just don’t get the same outcomes. I’d say I have to do three times as much work to get the same results as before.

“Call me a DevOps Mercenary. Just show me where the fire is!”

In the morning I’ll be thinking about what the team needs to be doing for the rest of the day. Quite often we’ll have received feedback on the previous day’s work from clients or customers about the things that are still technically painful for them. To deal with that we might need to pivot at some point during the day and it’s my job to set that tone during the morning stand-up.

I place a lot of focus on development experience (DX). I’m always asking, “How do we make things slick?” Reducing sources of friction is an ongoing process – any time there’s an opportunity to drive better developer experience, we’ll focus on that. Developers get their kick when they deliver something successfully, so I try to timebox things to make them achievable in a day. I don’t like the hangover type stuff

Any free time still left in the evening is spent on DIY in my apartment. It’s even more stressful than the gym! If we were married, my girlfriend Dan and I would’ve divorced and got back together again by now! Dan is Chinese, hence the slightly weird name.

We have a cat called Odin, which we wanted to name Lucifer, but Dan struggled with the pronunciation. By the time she’d mastered it we couldn’t exactly rename the poor cat, so when we bought our robot hoover we called that Lucifer instead.

Later, we like to chill in front of the TV. It’s usually just Dan, Odin and me curled up in front of a movie. It can be hard paying attention to the film because I’ll be preparing for the next day by staging all the changes I have lined up. The guys will get messages from me the evening before saying, “Hey, tomorrow we’re going to hit the ground running, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that...” I never really stop.

And before I know it, it’s time to get up, put my face on, and get back on the train. <31>

In the dark midwinter of early 2001, a group of like-minded software professionals gathered at a remote ski lodge in Utah. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the sort of setting which fires the imagination of Stephen King, but in this story our intrepid heroes come out on top. Over the course of a weekend, they drafted a document that changed the way we talk about software development.

How did it happen? And what relevance does the Agile Manifesto still have today? To find out, DOC checks intoâ&#x20AC;Ś

THE

WORDS: Bruce Johnston

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ILLUSTRATION: billmcconkey.co.uk

James Grenning

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James Big Grenning Read

O

ne man who survived the expedition to Snowbird was James Grenning, Agile Manifesto co-author and embedded software expert. DOC caught up with James to hear the inside story.

“Hey, I’ll be with you in a second. I just need to get some coffee – Monday morning came up on me pretty fast.” It’s 9am and I’m chatting with James Grenning on Zoom. He fixes himself a brew and tells me about the weekend he’s just spent in Chicago with his grown-up kids at the ball game. I get a little explainer on the geographical divide that separates the Cubs fans from their sworn enemies, the White Sox, and I’m reminded that James is good at explaining things – something I’d realised when I first met him after his keynote talk at CoDe-Conf 2017 in Copenhagen.

CREDITS: Illustration - billmcconkey.co.uk

I’ve arranged the interview to get some insights into what happened at Snowbird back in February 2001 – the ski resort we now know as the birthplace of the Agile Manifesto.

James was there and played his part, but over the years he’s developed a well-rehearsed line that makes light of his own input. Indeed, it’s the first thing he says once the conversation turns to the Manifesto: “I really wanted to go skiing. I’d been there before and I’ve told that story too many times to change it now. My expectations were to go and hang out with a bunch of guys who I knew and respected.”

I know James well enough to realise that he’ll make no grand claims for himself. Even if he’d authored the whole document on his own, he’d be too modest to admit it.

What I’m hoping for is that James can shed some light on the true story behind the Agile Manifesto – what actually happened in Snowbird over the course of that weekend? My initial research turned up a small historical piece written shortly after the event by Jim Highsmith, another coauthor, but it left me with as many questions as answers.

I’m left wondering about the seeming ease with which the

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IMAGE: The actual manifesto created at the event

“It was probably because of the people involved. Bob [Martin] had good connections, as did Alistair [Cockburn], and they were the guys who were really trying to make it happen. So they had a good reach. They knew a lot of people in the industry who they thought were into the same kind of things, or maybe against the same kind of things.”

I suppose I can understand how this might have been a big draw for everyone, with FOMO and all that. But they did more than just meet up and ski – how did all 17 of them

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“Yeah, let’s write down our four bullet points and go have dinner. No, it wasn’t quite that easy!” James explains. “It didn’t come quite so easily as you’d think, but it did distill out. We had three days of those meetings... maybe more like half-days so we could go out and play. But unlike many debates we find in our culture today, we were looking for areas of agreement, not for cementing disagreements.” I find myself nodding along. When put like this it seems obvious: areas of agreement, cooperation, collaboration, people – so many of the elements that informed the manifesto itself right there in the process. Of course. The medium is the message.

Extreme Programming

I want to know more about where the various personalities were coming from and we start to dive a little deeper. There had to be foundations, groundwork, or some shared platform to work on? It surely couldn’t have all been spun up from scratch that weekend. From Jim Highsmith’s account I read about a similar meetup at Red River Lodge in Oregon the previous year. Perhaps the preliminary work was done there?

Image - agilemanifesto.org

I’m clearly missing something, but what? I’m intrigued by Jim Highsmith’s description of the group as “organisational anarchists”, so I start off by asking James the simplest question of all: how did they succeed in getting everyone together?

succeed in reaching an agreement? Was it a case of enjoying the slopes and scribbling down some manifesto stuff when they found some time?

CREDITS: Illustration - billmcconkey.co.uk

manifesto came about; I struggle to organise a video call with more than two people in it. How exactly do you get 17 leading software engineers to a ski lodge in Utah and have them reach unanimous agreement on a document that would permanently change the way we approach software development? And over the course of a single weekend where they spent half the time skiing? I mean, come on!

James Grenning

“Let’s write down our four bullet points and go have dinner. No, it wasn’t quite that easy! It didn’t come quite so easily as you’d think, but it did distill out. We had three days of meetings... maybe more like half-days so we could go out and play” <37>

“I like to say there wouldn’t be an Agile without Extreme Programming. If you look through the names that signed the manifesto, a lot of the co-authors came from the Extreme Programming contingent. By calling it that it got everyone’s attention, and when you read about it you’d say, ‘That couldn’t possibly work.’ But then you try it and you realise that it does work.

“The Agile Manifesto had to soften that a little bit because the term ‘extreme’ scared people. It was always kind of a joke – do we need elbow pads and helmets for this? What’s so extreme here? So that word got softened, but over the

last five years or so I’ve been trying to bring it back. I’ll use ‘Agile’ but I’ll switch to Extreme Programming as soon as I can because that’s really the history of it. The creative problem-solving that Kent [Beck] and Ward [Cunningham] came up with amazes me to this day. They we not satisfied with the status quo of adding bugs to code and taking them out later.”

Method

Extreme Programming – now we’re really getting into it.

But I also want to know if they worked together, either in a big open session or in small groups according to expertise?

James disappears to go and look for something.

“One of the things we did as Extreme Programmers was to always have some of these.” He comes back into shot a

“I really consider myself extremely lucky. It was awesome to be involved in it”

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CREDITS: Illustration - billmcconkey.co.uk

James wasn’t at Red River, but he’s not overly convinced that too much came out of it. What he does want to draw my attention to is Extreme Programming.

James Grenning

few moments later waving a small pile of notecards. “For whatever reason, we tossed out some notecards and looked for things we could agree on, or believe in, or whatever.

In the 80s, at Teradyne, we studied problem solving and brainstorming techniques as part of Total Quality Management (TQM). One of the problems with the verbal brainstorm is the first idea will always get shot down by someone. Then either people stop talking or it just isn’t productive. But if we write our ideas down, everyone gets to express themselves without interruption and we can find out what we have in common. So there was that, a lot of whiteboard stuff, lots of back and forth... my memory of the event is not perfect.

“A friend told me several years after Agile became a big deal in the industry that I mentioned to him after the meeting I had offered the notecards. Tossing those cards out might’ve influenced things a bit, but this was a good group of strongminded people – trying to find what we could agree on was definitely where we were headed.”

Terminology

One thing I’m really struck by is the importance of terminology running through everything: “Extreme” Programming, an “Agile” Manifesto. Why agile? And how different might things have been had it been called something else? It’s a question that must’ve been put to the

various co-authors thousands of times over the years and I’m no different. I ask James who came up with it. “I think the first person I heard say the words, ‘We need a manifesto’ was Martin Fowler and that sounded kind of communist to me!”

I can’t help but smile at the collision between British and American English. A manifesto! Well done, Martin. But what about the word “agile”?

“Well, I don’t quite know, but one thing I can tell you is that ‘lightweight’ was dismissed really early. Ward said, ‘The first thing we need to do is come up with a better name because who wants to be known as a lightweight?’ There were a few words already out there, like ‘adaptive’, which I think would have also been great. I was sitting next to Kent and we’d settled on one of the other names, which I don’t remember now. But in the end we settled on a fine name, got our four bullet points, and we thought no one would care.”

But people did care. And they started caring pretty quickly.

I ask James about when he started to realise that what they had done at Snowbird was a big deal.

Influence

“Agile was appearing on the names of all these conferences pretty much right away. Around 2001, Bob started the XP Universe conference in the Chicago area, then Alistair started another conference that was more on the business

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CREDITS: Illustration - billmcconkey.co.uk

James Grenning

“One thing I can tell you is that ‘lightweight’ was dismissed really early. Ward Cunningham said, ‘The first thing we need to do is come up with a better name – who wants to be known as a lightweight?’” side. They kind of competed for a while before a grand unification around 2005.”

But what about today? Seventeen years on from Snowbird, what is the legacy of the Agile Manifesto? Is it still relevant for software in 2018?

“Unfortunately yes, because people read it in a really funny way. The part that was deemphasised is the only thing they can see. ‘People over processes and tools’ – so no processes and no tools. ‘Working software over comprehensive documentation’ – that’s taken to mean no documentation.

The continual misunderstanding of it keeps it relevant.”

I’m slightly surprised and a little disheartened by James’ answer. The Agile Manifesto might be a well known text, but it seems that some of its core messages still aren’t getting through to the people who need to hear them. Too many engineers are spending their lives hating something called Agile that isn’t really agile at all. So, where is the real legacy of the manifesto? Is it preserved in DevOps? “Yeah, I think it’s all very related. I’m looking at the manifesto now... we want to deliver something valuable to customers regularly. You could almost say, ‘Why come up with DevOps at all? It could easily have been End-to-End Agile’ or something like that.”

We’ve been talking for nearly an hour and I don’t want to keep James for much longer. His answers have really helped me understand how this important piece of software history came about, but there is one last thing I want to know.

I ask James what sort of effect being a co-author has had on his life and whether he feels a sense of pride at having been involved.

“I really consider myself extremely lucky. I mean, it was awesome to be involved in it, but my part was small. To have taken those great ideas that other people came up with and adapted them to the embedded world gives me a sense of pride. It would have taken a long time before somebody started to do this, so I think I’ve made some very important contributions there. And it’s been a lot of fun, too – it’s made for an interesting and fun life.”

With that I thank James for his contribution and we hang up the call. I take a few moments to digest the conversation. “I really wanted to go skiing,” he said. Maybe there’s more truth to that than I initially realised. After all, all work and no ski makes James a dull boy.

You can f ind out more about what James does at wingman-sw.com/about <41>

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Avoiding the Agile Alignment Trap Praqmaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s CTO, Mike Long, takes time out to consider the IT Alignment Trap, technical excellence and measuring progress WORDS: Mike Long

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CREDITS: Image - Sam Riley: samrileyphotography.com

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ISSUE ISSUE#01 #1 2018

DEVOPSCULTURE.IO

I

n 2007 MIT Sloan Management Review published an article titled Avoiding the Alignment Trap in IT. In it the authors set out the results of a survey of more than 500 senior business and technology executives from around the world. They found most companies were struggling to harness their IT capability to achieve growth strategies.

Most companies (71%) fell into what the authors termed the Maintenance Zone, where executives believed their IT function was neither highly aligned or highly effective. These companies spent averagely on IT, and had mostly average financial results – IT spend here was intended to do little more than keep the lights on.

Companies that had IT functions highly aligned

Analysis of the respondents clustered on two main axes: how aligned the IT organisation is with business needs, and how effective they are at delivering technology.

The businesses whose IT function was working well (the right side of the model) all had better financial returns[1]. Companies with a well-oiled IT function spent 15% less than average

“Companies were struggling to harness IT capability”

11% Highly Aligned

with business priorities, but ineffectively so, fell into the Alignment Trap. These companies spent 13% more than average on IT, but their three-year growth rates were 14% lower than average.

7%

“Alignment Trap”

“Enabled Growth”

+13

+35 -6

-14

Alignment

74%

8%

“Maintenance Zone” Less Aligned

“Well-oiled IT”

+0

+11 -15

-2.0

Less Effective

% of Respondents (n=504)

Efficacy

Highly Effective

Differences in Percentages compared to overall averages IT Spending 3-Year Sales Compound Annual Growth Rate

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BACKEND DEVOPS READING ROOM

RUDDER FORCE TO PORT SIDE

PORT SHIP’S SURGE VELOCITY

RUDDER TO STBD

and those who were highly aligned and highly effective outperformed the growth average of their peers by 35%.

The First Move Is Critical What the authors discovered is that organisations don’t become high performing by starting with alignment improvements. Rather, only by improving delivery performance first was it possible to achieve IT Enabled Growth: “Contrary to conventional wisdom, the path to IT-powered growth lies first in building high effectiveness and only then ensuring that IT projects are highly aligned to the business.”

STBD

can move fast, but not necessarily in the direction the business needs.

• Organisations caught in the Alignment Trap are all rudder, no engine. Lots of steering, but no forward momentum.

• High Performing organisations are powerboats. They can go where they want and they get there fast.

how many companies begin their digital transformation by reorganising the business to include IT functions. Adopting agile organisational models such as SAFe or the Spotify Model will certainly help ensure that plans and priorities are active decisions. In short, they can solve an alignment problem in an organisation.

• Maintenance Trap organisations are drifting at sea. These companies are treading water.

When considered like this it’s unsurprising that the authors discovered the Alignment Trap. Once an IT organisation has its full focus on business needs it becomes harder to make the strategic investments in better, simpler technologies and approaches. “Aligning a poorly performing IT organisation to the right business objectives still won’t get the objectives accomplished,” says Richard F. Connell, CIO of Selective Insurance Group.

However, the Alignment Trap highlights that putting the business in the hands of a poorly performing IT organisation will result in poor outcomes. For this model to work you must have technical leadership setting clear technical strategies based on strong business cases. As the article states: “Even companies that don’t consider their IT organisations highly aligned were spending 15% less than average, and their growth rates were 11% higher. These are numbers that justify considerable investment in pursuing effectiveness.”

• Highly Effective organisations are all engine, no rudder. They

Digital Transformation Given this information, it is instructive to look at

These findings make it clear that pursuing technical excellence is not only the

If we reframe this in terms of a nautical analogy, we might better understand why:

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ISSUE ISSUE#01 #1 2018

DEVOPSCULTURE.IO

CREDITS: Image - Marie Kruse

When Mike isn’t working, he’s working. And if he isn’t doing that then you can probably catch him talk at code-conf.com events

first step to delivering IT Enabled Growth, but also an end in itself.

finding: technical excellence is foundational. But how can we measure the progress?

Technical Excellence The DevOps research coming out of DORA provides an even stronger case for why that might be[2]. What Nicole Forsgren and her team has found is that when taken together, Lean Product Management (Alignment) and Continuous Delivery (Effectiveness) are predictive of organisational performance. All the data points towards a single key

Helpfully, DORA again provides insight into strong predictive measures of IT performance which work across industry and sectors.

These four measures, taken together, can help determine your progress: • Deployment Frequency • Lead Time for Changes • Change Failure Rate • Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR)

“A single key finding: technical excellence is foundational” These metrics are incredibly easy to measure. In fact, you probably already have this data in your change management systems, version control logs and defect defect databases.

So, what’s stopping you?

[1] This data continues to be supported by the research in the State of DevOps Reports [2] For more info, see devops-research.com/

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BACKEND INSIDE VIEW

Company Fact File:

Inside:Praqma The home of continuous delivery, where it’s not just the software that constantly improves WORDS: Bruce Johnston

F

ounded over a decade ago, Praqma was one of the earliest practitioners of continuous delivery and DevOps in Scandinavia. From a small base in Copenhagen they have steadily grown an innovative approach to consultancy and training that now stretches across the region, from Oslo to Aarhus.

A key element in the growth of Praqma has been its commitment towards knowledge sharing and community building, which they achieve by hosting dozens of events and meetups each year.

Their expansion has also been made possible by a recruitment process that has produced one of the most multinational teams in the region.

One of the secrets of their success is the dedicated investment they make in their people. Praqma stays at the forefront of industry by making sure employees spend at least 20% of their time on personal development. Sounds good to you? Check their website – they’re probably hiring! <48>

2007 Founded in...

6

16

No of nations represented: Denmark Sweden Russia Czech Rep Nigeria Hungary Poland France Pakistan Scotland Australia Norway Belgium Palestine Malaysia Israel

Offices in Europe...

Copenhagen Stockholm Aarhus Oslo Malmo Gothenburg

Per cent of time dedicated to staff improvement per week

DEVOPSCULTURE.IO

ISSUE ISSUE#01 #1 2018

Staff Focus Name: Sami Alajrami Joined: June 2017 Role: DevOps Consultant Location: Oslo

CREDITS: Image - Marie Kruse

Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s it like working in such a multinational team?

It gives you a much richer experience both on a personal and professional level. You learn how different people tend to approach problems.

What are the best things about working at Praqma?

Staying up to date with all bleeding edge technologies to deliver the best solutions. We also get to do different things like blogging, contributing to the community, writing code, and researching new technologies. We rarely get bored!

What key things have you learned at Praqma?

Hands-on knowledge with technologies and the skills to deal with different customers to gain their trust and deliver the best results.

Invite DOC to your office! Contact bruce@devopsculture.io <49>

Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re looking for contributors & collaborators!

Do you write blogs for your company?

Or enjoy illustration and photography?

Then we want to hear from you!

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BACKEND HOME & AWAY

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ISSUE ISSUE#01 #1 2018

DEVOPSCULTURE.IO

Distributed Scenes Matt Wynne Cucumber’s co-founder, CEO and the author of The Cucumber Book tells us all about the benefits of ditching the bright lights of city life for Loch-side living WORDS: Bruce Johnston

M

CREDITS: Image - dsbeg.com

att! Life in the Scottish countryside – how did that come about?

About eight years ago we were living in central London and we’d always had a dream to move to the countryside. My Dad had a house in Scotland – not the one we’re in now – for about 10 years without really doing anything with it. We moved into it, fixed it up and a couple of years later he came around one summer and said, “Oh, this is nice, isn’t it?” And then he took it back! But by that point we’d fallen in love with Scotland and we’d proved to ourselves that we could make a living outside of London.

Why did you opt for Lochgoilhead?

We started looking around for where else we could live. My wife, Anna, is an architect so we really wanted another project to work on. Then we found this amazing rundown old farmhouse three miles outside Lochgoilhead. The Forestry Commission owned

it in the 60s and 70s, then a gamekeeper had it for 30 years. After that somebody from London bought it as a holiday home and it went to ruin because they just weren’t here often enough.

Frozen pipes, holes in the ceiling, water coming in everywhere... that sort of thing.

That sounds a bit like hard work to us?

At first we thought we could just change the kitchen and put a lick of paint on the place. But when we started to peel back the layers, the plaster started coming away in big chunks. We put a caravan in the yard and spent a year living in there while we fixed the place up.

Once we got the cottage into a habitable state we moved back indoors!

Having looked through the photos, we have to ask – what’s with the shape of the building?

It’s an old U-shaped traditional Scottish farm steading, with stone barns built around a yard and a cottage on one end of it.

We live in the cottage and take up half of the steading, there’s a woodshed and workshop in the middle, and then there’s another bit on the other end. That used to be a stable – you could’ve walked horses into it when we bought it – but we’ve converted that into a holiday let. We fixed that up so people can visit us. We’re on Airbnb – come and stay!

Thanks for the invite!

How do we get there?

It’s less than an hour from Glasgow airport. It’s a lovely journey – driving down the side of Loch Lomond is always a joy. You get some incredible views there in the mornings when the sun’s coming up. I just love coming home: leaving civilisation, seeing the city disappear in the rear view <53>

BACKEND HOME & AWAY

mirror, with the mountains coming into view in front of me. It’s only an hour from Glasgow, but you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere.

Lofty ambitions: country living with WiFi that most Londoners would kill for

It sounds a bit remote – do we have to bring our own groceries?

We’ve got a little shop in the village where you can get white bread, milk, crap beer, and dog biscuits.

There’s a nice deli not too far away, close to Loch Fyne, which has fresh fish, nice cheeses, fancy bacon, that sort of thing. If you want anything more than that you’re driving to Dunoon or Helensburgh which is about 45 minutes away.

What about work? Isn’t it hard to concentrate with all that scenery distracting you?

It does pain me when I’ve got stuff to do on really lovely days. I look out of the window and I want just want to be out there. But I get lots of chances to go out because it’s right on my doorstep.

When I can, at about 4:30pm I’ll stop work and go out running for an hour just to process the day. Without a commute you still need to make that transition between work and home.

There must be a downside to this idyllic lifestyle. What’s the internet like?

[Buries head in hands] Sigh!

It was a real puzzle when we first moved here because we couldn’t get broadband.

We are three miles from the exchange in the village and the lines that run from us to the village are the old trunk <54>

cables. The phone company have an obligation to provide broadband to every UK household, but there’s no limit on how long they can take to resolve a fault. I’ve

had a ticket open with them for three years!

No internet?! How did you survive?

We had satellite broadband

for ages which is quite an interesting thing. You get amazing bandwidth – I was getting about 20 Mbps down, 10 Mbps up, but it really lags because the bits have

“We’ve got a little shop in the village where you can get white bread, milk, crap beer, and dog biscuits”

ISSUE ISSUE #BETA #1 2018

DEVOPSCULTURE.IO

to go all the way to space.

So you can watch a movie in HD with no problems, but if you’re clicking around a website it feels really slow and clunky.

CREDITS: Image - dsbeg.com

That must be a little frustrating?

Imagine it as a programmer!

You don’t see the key press until it’s gone all the way up to space and all the way back down to the server, which then says, “Yes, we can have that key.” And that’s when you see it! So we’re talking about a second-and-a-half delay. Luckily, we finally found a company called Evolving Networks who came up with an ADSL solution.

I’ve got three phone lines coming into the house and a magic box that bonds the

signals together. I get about 7 Mbps out of each one, so about 20 Mbps combined.

What’s the best thing about living out there?

I love how easy it is to get into the wilderness. On my last birthday we got into the van, put the kayaks on the roof, and by the afternoon we’d paddled out to this amazing castle on an island called Innisconnel on Loch Awe. It’s a ruined 13th century castle and you can just paddle out and camp there. Being able to get out into the scenery and mountains has to be the best thing.

Right, DOC needs to get a farmhouse. Be right back!

If Matt’s place sounds like your idea of a great weekend away, why not stay with him? Visit dsbeg.com to f ind out more

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ISSUE ISSUE#01 #1 2018

you’ll help them do less work by giving them a script instead of a Word document, and offer pull requests instead of change management tickets. Bonus points if you can recruit an IT mole to work on the inside, provide intel, and sabotage any ITCM that looks like it was invented in the days of COBOL.

sympathetic ear and lavish you with advice for the ages!

Keys to the kingdom My IT department won’t give me SSH keys for the production machines.

Instead they want me to write a deployment document in Word and request prod changes via a change management service.

These jokers don’t seem to

get the concept of continuous delivery. Should I steal the keys?

Mr. Johnny Peacock, DevOps Guru / Rainmaker While it is fun to do, stealing the keys is probably not a great

career strategy. I recommend a more effective and cunning approach: the cold war method, AKA social engineering. Bake the IT department a cake, because it’s easier to attract ants with honey than vinegar. Tell them

Got a problem? Then write to dearaunty@devopsculture.io <56>

Ammentorp Photography | stock.adobe.com

Got issues? Don’t we all. Aunty DevOps is here to lend a

It could very well be that a new job would be an easier path to happiness, but if you believe in karma, you might want to do a good deed in current job first. Every company who “cannot” go to the cloud, will end up in the cloud in the future regardless. So the question is, what is currently stopping this?

If it is politics, then you have a chance. If it is legal contracts then run

CREDITS: Images - ©watkung | ALEKSANDR VOLKOV |

Aunty DevOps

Overboard!

In the mid-2000s we outsourced our IT department to an offshore third party. It can take weeks to get a new virtual machine, and that is only if we ask really nicely and choose from one of the three terrible templates they provide.

Should I get a new job? I hear the grass is greener on the cloud side…

Mrs E. Winstanley, Automation Toolsmith

We’re looking for feedback

for the hills... and bring your best colleagues with you!

Legacy lemming Our Chief Architect thinks that Docker is magical pixie dust, which will save our legacy system. I tried pointing out that the code is still junk based on Windows, and our Docker image is 20G – to which he replied “Kubernetes will save us!”

What should I do?

Ms Jessica Hurts, Grunt Developer Well, Jessica, I hate to break it to you, but your Chief Architect is a liability. I would consider suggesting spiking his Kool-Aid with truth serum, but the problem is he actually believes the nonsense he is selling.

The good news is that since he is so gullible it should be easy to plant a new storyline in his logic.

Leave a fake Gartner report lying around describing the massive ROI of improving legacy systems together with a container strategy.

Within days he will be running around the off ice telling everyone about his great new ideas...

Like what you’ve read or hated every word? We’d love to hear from you.

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