Jason Adam — A conversation about trunk-based development

Jonny Williams works at Red Hat as an agile Delivery Lead, and he joins Tiny DevOps to cut through the confusion surrounding "Delivery Management".

In this episode...

• What is "Delivery Management"?
• The discipline vs the role
• Comparisons to Product Management, Agile, Lean, Scrum, ITIL, and ITSM
• History of Delivery Management
• How does Delivery Management fit into "Agile"?
• Where is Delivery Management most popular?
• How can you start benefiting from the Delivery Management discipline in your organization?
• How to get started as a Delivery Manager
• Who should avoid Delivery Management

Guest
Jonny Williams, Agile Delivery Lead at Red Hat
Web site: https://delivervalue.uk/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonny-williams-83433836/

Resources
Book: Delivery Management: Enabling Teams to Deliver Value

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Gorjan Jovanoski is the co-founder of AirCare, the mobile app that helps you know what you breathe. He joins me to tell the story of founding AirCare, and share some of the surprises, good and bad, along the way.

In this episode...

• What is AirCare, and what does it do for you?
• What is its business model?
• AirCare's origin story
• AirCare's tech stack: Flutter, PHP, MongoDB, DigitalOcian
• Request volume and seasonality
• How to aggregate 35,000 data sources in PHP
• Detecting and responding to a DoS attack
• The software development cycle at AirCare
• Observability at AirCare
• Scaling challenges along the way
• Next steps and objectives

Guest
Gorjan Jovanoski
AirCare web site

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Oshri Cohen is a fractional CTO with a diverse background, currently working with four companies. He joins me on the show to cut through some of the confusion surrounding the Chief Technical Officer role.

In this episode:

• The four phases of the CTO role
• How often can the same person satisfy the needs of all four phases? (Spoiler: Very rarely)
• How often can a founding CTO succeed in all four phases?
• A good CTO focuses on his or her strengths, and hires out the rest
• What lead Oshri to start as a fCTO
• Why many, perhaps most, early-stage startups don't need a full-time CTO
• Why a development agency is like a mischievous genie
• Why developers love working with a fCTO
• What could you do with the 150k you'd save by hiring a fCTO instead of a full-time CTO?
• Tips for becoming an fCTO yourself

Guest
Oshri Cohen
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oshricohen/
Website: oshricohen.me

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Paul Cothenet of Patch.io joins me this time to discuss war stories implementing observabillity at two small startups.

In this episode…
- How to choose an obervabillity tool/platform
- Why AWS doesn't provide the best observability platform
- Teaching the team to use observability
- How to convince stakeholders that observability is valuable
- What would you miss the most if your observability platform was no longer available?
- The business value of a good observability solution
- Making observability metrics easy for management to use
- What does it all cost?
- Advice for getting started

Resources
Rands Leadership Slack: https://randsinrepose.com/welcome-to-rands-leadership-slack/

Guest
Paul Cothenet
Twitter: @paulcothenet
Company, and jobs: patch.io

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James McShane is the Engineering Director at SuperOrbital and has been working with Kubernetes for about 6 years, in a large number of environments. He joins the show today to help unpack whether Kubernetes is a good choice for your small company.

- What is Kubernetes, and what problems does it solve for you?
- Choosing Kubernetes means choosing a set of problems.
- Which application architectures match well with Kubernetes?
- Which problems Kubernetes doesn't solve well for you.
- How to handle your application data layer when starting with Kubernetes
- Some of the differences between the big three's Kubernetes offerings
- Should you hire experienced Kubernetes engineers before adopting Kubernetes?
- Why is Kubernetes controversial, and how can a newcomer cut through the hype?
- Common newbie mistakes
- How does price figure into the decision to choose Kubernetes or not?
- How to learn Kubernetes if your employer isn't using it

Guest
James McShane
Twitter: @jmcshane
Engineering Director at SuperOrbital.io

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Dave Mangot is a speaker, author, teacher, and Silicon Valley veteran.  His focus is helping private equity portofolio companies use their technology organization to maximize growth, and he joins me today to discuss the contentious topic of Friday deployments and why you definitely should do them and why you definitely should not do them.  Confused?

In this episode

• Mores are not moratoriums
• Shaming is inappropriate, on both sides of the issue
• Every outage is unexpected, nobody knows what might go wrong
• Friday deployment should be an informed choice
• Why small batch deployments are important
• Deploying features vs other changes
• You should be able to deploy at any time, but separate that from choosing to deploy at any time
• Why more QA can be worse than less QA
• If deployment hurts, or causes fear, do it more
• Responding to failures when they do occur
• Building an accurate mental model of your system

Resources
Article: Deploy on Fridays, or Don't
Book: Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and Dave Farley
Talk: How Complex Systems Fail by Richard Cook (Velocity 2012)
Book: Project to Product by Mik Kersten
Book: Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming

Guest
Dave Mangot
Web site: https://www.mangoteque.com/
LinkedIn: mangot
Twitter: @davemangot

Watch this episode on YouTube.

Problem solver Tod Hansmann of Catalyst joins me to discuss "observability": What it is, why it means different things to different people, and how to get started if it's new for you.

In this episode:

• What is observability (o11y)?
• What can observability do for you?
• What metrics should you track?
• How does observability relate to logging, alerting, monitoring, and other practices?
• Who should be responsbile for obervability?
• How heavily should upper management be involved?
• How does observability relate to culture?
• CI/CD as a prerequisite for observability
• Why metrics are better than logs
• Surprising metrics that can be important
• The relationship between monitoring and automated testing
• Good observability as an enabler for canary deployments, test in production, and other practices
• How to define service level objectives
• How do you define "uptime"
• How to address corner cases
• Why being on call is desireable

Guest
Tod Hansmann
Twitter: @todpunk
LinkedIn: Tod Hansmann
Catalyst

Resources
Book: Site Reliability Engineering

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Jason Adam is a software with a non-traditional background in biology, business development, and data analytics. Now he's active as a developer, and on the lookout for proven practices he can introduce to his team. On this episode we talk about Trunk-Based Development, and the related topics of continuous integration and deployment, infrastruture as code, and much more.

In this episode

• How Trunk-based development differs from GitFlow and other branching strategies
• Two flavors of trunk-based development
• How Trunk-based development fits into the larger picture of continuous integration and continuous delivery
• Techniques for working in smaller batches
• How test-driven development enhances trunk-based development
• Using feature flags for smaller batches
• How to keep pull requests small
• Cherry-picking small changes out of a larger pull request
• How Infrastructure-as-Code works with CI and CD

Resources

• Book: Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and Dave Farley
• Book: Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans
• Book: Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers
• Book: Clean Architecture by Robert Martin

Guest
Jason Adam
Web site & newsletter: functionalbits.io

Have a topic to discuss on the show? Let me know!
Want a private consultation? Borrow my brain.

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Since leaving the Royal Navy about 7 years ago, Jac Hughes has found himself drawn to the world of Scrum and agile software development. He now runs Everyday Agile, an agile coaching and training business based in the UK.

In this episode

• How Jac got into Agile and Scrum
• Learning from a wide variety of organizations, from simple to complex
• What does "Agile" mean to you, and how is it different from "agility"?
• What is the relationship between Scrum and agility?
• Picking and choosing the elements of Scrum, SAFe, LeSS, and other approaches, that work best for the context.
• When is Scrum the right or wrong fit?
• Top-down vs bottom-up agile adoption
• How agility permeates the business, not just development, from client contracts to recruiting and onboarding, and everything else
• How to decide on an agile approach, whether Scrum or something else
• Does Scrum work when cross-functional teams aren't possible?
• Biggest misconceptions about Scrum
• How to start adopting Scrum
• Does Scrum make sense for a platform, operations, or DevOps team?
• Thoughts on story points, estimates, and #NoEstimates
• How important is official Scrum training or certifications?
• When and how should a team find external help when implementing Scrum?

Resources
Book: When Will It Be Done? by Daniel S. Vacanti
Blog series: Story Pointless (Part 1 of 3) by Nick Brown
Podcast: Scrum Master Toolbox

Guest
Jac Hughes
LinkedIn: jac-hughes
Everyday Agile
YouTube channel: Everyday Agile

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Morgan Craft is a New York-based former software engineer and CTO, and currently a founder and Fractional CTO. He joins me to discuss the concept of a fractional CTO, why they're growing in popularity, and how to decide whether one is right for you.

In this episode

• Why would a company hire a fractional CTO instead of a full-time CTO?
• Why it's so hard for early-stage startups to hire a full-time CTO
• How soon should a new company hire a fractional CTO?
• What are the risks of continuing without a CTO?
• How "hands-on" is a typical fractional CTO?
• The relationship between the CTO and the product in small companies
• How to choose a fractional CTO
• How do you coach and mentor developers you work with?
• Thoughts on working with off-shore developers?
• Is a fractional CTO as committed as a full-time CTO?
• What does it look like to graduate from a fractional CTO to a full-time CTO?
• What does a fractional CTO cost?
• Do fractional CTOs typically earn equity?
• Using a fractional CTO to hire your first developer
• How to connect with a fractional CTO

Resources

• Morgan Craft on Managers Club podcast: What is a Fractional CTO?
• Rand's List Leadership Slack

Guest
Morgan Craft
Web site: MorganCraft.com
LinkedIn: mgan59
gitBabel

Watch this episode on YouTube.