Tiny DevOps

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

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Stacy Cashmore has the interesting title of Tech Explorer DevOps at Omniplan, which means she has free reign to do what she thinks she needs to do!  In this episode, we talk about a big rewrite decision she made, and the results of this decision, good and bad.

In this episode

• Why "DevOps" does not belong in a job title, and why Stacy put it in her job title anyway.
• What is DevOps, if not a job title?
• How to respond to mistakes we've made
• Why a rewrite is always the wrong decision
• Why a rewrite was the right decision in this case
• The pressure of proving yourself once you convince management to do a rewrite
• DevOps and CI/CD goals for the new system
• Where the problem started to go wrong: Awkward tests, shortcuts and technical debt
• Working against deadline pressure
• Taking the pragmatic approach to CD
• The drawbacks to not doing "full CD"
• Plans for ongoing improvement
• Things to do differently next time, and lessons learned

Resources
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis, Jez Humble
The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim
The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim

Guest
Stacy Cashmore
Twitter: @Stacy_Cash
Web site: stacy-clouds.net

Watch this episode on YouTube.

Bryan Finster returns to Tiny DevOps, this time to explain the amazing benefits of his new Scaled Agile DevOps Maturity Framework (SAD MF), the silver bullet that you, and literally everyone else, should be using.

In this episode

• What motivated the invention of the Scaled Agile DevOps Maturity Framework (SAD MF)?
• How Convoys are superior to Trains for agility
• An overview of some of the new Agile Ceremonies introduced by this innovative framework
• The benefits of Scrum of Scrum of Scrum of Scrums
• How SAD ensures that we build quality in, via the ceremony of the Tribunal
• How to guard psychological safety of leadership
• How a SAD MF certification badge exemplifies the value of certification badges
• Why you should absolutely be SAD MF certified, even if you already have other certifications
• Why executives love SAD MF: No risk of culture change!
• Why the titles provided by SAD MF instill confidence in the heirarchy
• Why nobody dislikes SAD MF
• The amazing metrics mandated by SAD MF which make manager's lives seem easier immediately
• How the SAD MF QA Team frees coders from worrying about user requirements, and whether their code works
• What changes are coming up in SAD MF 3.0?

Resources
Scaled Agile DevOps
Minimum Viable CD and (Tiny DevOps Episode #21)

Guest
Bryan Finster
LinkedIn: bryan-finster
Medium: https://bdfinst.medium.com/

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More and more organizations are adopting a "Radically Collaborative" approach to business. Matt K. Parker, author of the new book A Radical Enterprise joins me to discuss what this means, why it's desirable, and how to begin adopting these practices in our own organizations.

In this episode

• What is "Radical Collaboration"?
• What does radical collaboration mean for the business bottom line?
• The four imperatives of radical collaboration: Team Autonomy, Managerial Devolution, Deficiency Gratification, Candid Vulnerability
• How do Agile Software Development and the DevOps movement relate to the idea of radical collaboration?
• How are OKRs similar to or different from the radical collaboration model?
• The "Advice Process", and how decisions are made without designated managers.
• What recourse do these organizations have against potential "bad actors"?
• How do self-selected salaries work?
• How does this book fit into the landscape of recent books such as Reinventing Organizations and Team of Teams on new ways of management?
• Do companies ever fail in their attempts to become radically collaborative, and why?
• What can a lone individual do to begin a transformation toward radical collaboration?
• When is the best time in a company's life cycle to begin a radical collaboration transformation?
• What can a solo founder or entrepreneur do to begin laying the foundation for radical collaboration when they make their first hire?
• How long does it take to transform to a radically collaborative organization?

Resources

• Book: A Radical Enterprise by Matt K. Parker
• HOW report
• Book: High Output Management by Andrew Grove
• Book: Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux
• Book: Team of Teams by Gen. Stanley McChrystal
• Book: Corporate Rebels by Joost Minnaar
• Blog post: How to Run A Radically Collaborative Meeting In 3 Easy Steps by Matt K. Parker
• Book: Turn the Ship Around by L. David Marquet
• Book: Humanocracy by Gary Hamel & Michele Zanini
• Book: The No-Limits Enterprise by Doug Kirkpatrick
• Book: Holacracy by Brian J. Robertson
• Corporate Rebels web site
• MattKParker.com to join the Slack community

Guest
Matt K. Parker
Web site: MattKParker.com
Email: matt@mattkparker.com

Watch this episode on YouTube.

In this episode, I tackle some questions from listeners, and provide my own answers to your DevOps Careers questions:

• What are red flags in job ads about DevOps?
• How can I best prepare for an interview?
• What can I do to prepare for a DevOps Director Role?
• How do we cope with the expectation that we need to be learning new technologies all the time?

Resources
The Daily Commit: Knowledge Options

Send your questions for an upcoming Q&A episode to jonathan@jhall.io.

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Joy Ebertz is a Principal Software Engineer at Split. She focuses on the technical vision for the backend team, and she joins me today to talk about some of the obvious, as well as not so obvoius ways in which feature flags can be used on projects of any size.

In this episode

• When does it make sense to start using a Feature Flagging library or service?
• Should you build your own Feature Flagging service?
• Using Feature Flags to test in production
• Using Feature Flags for large features to allow Continuous Integratoin
• Enabling feature packs or service tiers with Feature Flags
• Feature Flags for circuit-breaking
• How to use Feature Flags for infrastructure migrations
• What is feature parity checking, and how to do it with Feature Flags
• Some common gotchas with Feature Flags
• How do A/B tests relate to Feature Flags?
• Differences on mobile apps when using Feature Flags

Resources
Split.io
Blog: 7 Ways We Use Feature Flags Every Day at Split

Guest
Joy Ebertz
Blog: https://jkebertz.medium.com/
Twitter: @jkebertz
LinkedIn: joyebertz

Watch this episode on YouTube.

This week I share 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.

Resources
Blog: Joel on Software
Book: Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers
Book: Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck
Book: Clean Code by Robert Martin
The Joel Test
Talk: 10+ Deploys Per Day (12:45)
The Jonathan Test
Lean CD Bootcamp
Presentation Slides and notes

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Lynn Thames' business Excel Software Services, helps manufacturing and distribution companies with software automation. She joins me to help answer the question: What does software development have in common with manufacturing?  Her answer: Agility.

In this episode

• Who is Excel Software Services, and what they do
• How Excel was founded by Lynn's father in 1978
• What kinds of companies Excel work with, and what problems they need help solving
• How Excel solves these problems, with SaaS and custom software solutions
• The challenge and dangers of vendor lock-in when building on a third-party platform like Magento
• Parallels between manufacturing and software development
• The challenges and benefits of doing agile software development for clients
• The importance of trust and buy-in for agile software development
• Value-pricing software development
• Excel's switch from waterfall to agile and Scrum
• Estimating development tasks for clients

Resources
Book: The Phoenix Project
Book: The Goal
Value Pricing

Guest
Lynn Thames
Excel Software Services

Watch this episode on YouTube.

Does your company produce open-source software? Are you considering doing so?  Emily Omier helps open-source startups with product positioning, and today she joins me to discuss how you can position your open-source project, if you have one, and help you decide if you should have one.

In this episode:

• What are the reasons to contribute open-source, as a company?
• What are the differences and siilarities between open-source and non-open-source software products.
• How to market your product to both technical and non-technical people.
• Why to focus on outcomes before features
• Who are the buyers/stakeholders for your product?
• Use language that resonates with your target audience
• Should you seek contributors for an open-source project? And if so, how?
• Tips for accepting financial sponsorships

Guest
Emily Omier
emilyomier.com
Cloud Native Startup podcast
Positioning Open Source blog
Twitter: @EmilyOmier

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Adrian Stanek, of Bits in Motion, joins me to relate his success story of transforming his organization's software development process via baby steps.  We discuss his old architecture, why it was problematic, and the strategy he employed to gradually replace it with a new, more modern micro-frontend-based architecture.  Adrian also shares where improvements are still needed, and his planned next steps to get there.

Resources
Daily Email: Why most Agile Transformations fail
Strangler Fig Application by Martin Fowler
Lean CD

Guest
Adrian Stanek
LinkedIn: adrianstanek
https://adrianstanek.dev/
bitsinmotion

Watch this episode on YouTube.

Charles Max Wood is the founder of Top End Devs, a platform focused on teaching developers how to achive top 5% status in their chosen field, and in this episode we talk about what that means, and how six simple practices can help you achieve that goal.

We discuss whether everyone ought to aim for the top 5%, and why most people don't make it. We talk about the daily, weekly, monthly, and other habits that can help anyone climb the ranks quickly.

Resources
Adventures in DevOps Podcast
Top End Devs
Book: The MaxCoders Guide To Finding Your Dream Developer Job

Guest
Charles Max Wood
Top End Devs half off!
Twitter: @cmaxw

Watch this episode on YouTube.