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Category: DevOps Culture

  • Techstrong TV: Closing the Diversity Gap in Tech Careers

    Techstrong TV: Closing the Diversity Gap in Tech Careers

    Charlene and Liliana discuss closing the gap in diversity in careers in tech. Learning to code can be a beneficial skill for traditionally underrepresented demographics, leading to more employment opportunities. The video and a transcript of the conversation are below.



    Recorded Voice:         This is Digital Anarchist.

     

    Charlene O’Hanlon:   Hey everybody, welcome back to Techstrong TV. I’m Charlene O’Hanlon and I’m here now with Liliana Monge, who is the cofounder and CEO of Sabio Coding Bootcamp. Liliana, thank you so much for joining me today, I really do appreciate it.

     

    Liliana Monge:           Thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited to have this conversation.

     

    O’Hanlon:   Excellent, excellent. Well we are happy to have you here, especially because I, I really do appreciate the efforts that you guys are doing through your coding bootcamp and really want to give you guys a little boost up if you will by a little bit of free promotion.

     

                                     But let’s talk about what you guys are doing. What, tell me a little bit about Sabio Boot, ah, Coding Bootcamp.

     

    Monge:       Yeah, so we started in the fall of 2013 in Los Angeles. Back then we had a very singular focus to make sure that the LA ecosystem was really going to be diverse. There was you know Los Angeles kind of at one point in time really lived in the shadows of San Francisco, of Silicon Valley and you know I would say in 2010, 2011 things really started to get heated up, more venture capitalists started to come into the state, a lot more companies started going public, such as Cornerstone OnDemand. So we knew what was going to happen in terms of all of this amazing wealth creation and jobs.

     

                                     So my partner and I, my cofounder, Gregorio and I, decided that we wanted to make sure that the ecosystem in California and Los Angeles was going to be diverse. So we set up a really innovative program that allows any adult who is smart and motivated to become a software developer within a very short period of time. So it’s very practical training. We were a hundred percent dedicated to helping women, more Latinos, more Black people, people who are underrepresented in tech like military veterans join this innovation economy.

     

    O’Hanlon:   That’s great, that’s great. And I’ve spoken with folks in other cities who basically have the same idea to, to really bring up the, you know rise up the traditionally underrepresented communities when it comes to technology. And it really surprises me how many start with these coding bootcamps or these coding classes. It seems like that is kind of the cornerstone of so many IT jobs these days. So I mean do you see a lot of folks entering the tech space using that particular avenue, the coding or, or is it do you think that it is kind of fundamental these days?

     

    Monge:       So I do think it’s definitely fundamental and it is a solution that can be applied pretty much throughout the United States or the world at this time, especially because we see the cost of hardware has come down significantly. That is a barrier to entry, right? You have to kind of have your own machine which is you know that, that needs to run VC software. As we all know software engineers run quite VC software. So you have to start with a price point of somewhere around you know $1500.00 to $2000.00 so that every person has the equipment they need, so that can be a barrier.

     

                                     However, once if you find a way to overcome the hardware barrier, you also have to make sure that there’s reliable internet, right, because all the information is on the internet, you’re posting to AWS Cloud probably your code and things like that. So there are two barriers.

     

                                     But then the last component, which is curriculum and practical training to become a software engineer I would say that is probably the most prolific. There is so much curriculum out there. So we decided to build our own custom curriculum. However, there are other organizations that release curriculum that’s available. There’s also a bunch of free stuff. Vendors many times have free resources. So it is a very wonderful solution to help any population.

     

                                     You know there’s so much going on right now. Like let’s say in Appalachia where the economy is changing and so people are like, “Is this a possible solution?” Miami is going through a massive transformation, right? They were known for hospitality, for travel, for leisure and now it’s just got this massive tech injection. So you can see how you can really take a coding bootcamp and kind of pluck it anywhere and if there is an ecosystem that’s going to support it, it can definitely create an amazing tech workforce anywhere in the country.

     

    O’Hanlon:   Yeah, I, I find it especially in, in urban areas that these coding bootcamps are, are cropping up. And I wonder if that’s also kind of I don’t want to call it a “substitute,” but maybe another avenue for especially kids coming out of high school that don’t really have maybe the means to go to a four-year college and then there are some people who don’t see the value in a four-year college, they just want to do the tech school route and get, get a basic understanding of what they need to do and then, and then go out and enter the workforce.

     

                                     So do you see these, ah, the important or the, the popularity of these coding bootcamps do you see them as more of a kind of a just a step for or these transitional and especially traditional under-represented communities a way for them to, to get the resources, to get the education they need without having to spend four years in college? Or do you see it more as they’re looking at it as, “I don’t want to go to college, but I do want to learn a trade and I want to…you know I see that there is value in coding because tech is the future.” So where, where are you kind of seeing people joining the bootcamps from?

     

    Monge:       Yeah, so that’s a fantastic question. When we began we thought we were going to be able to take students who graduated from high school and enroll in the program. However, we have found that 18-19-year-olds are a little bit too young to think about, “In three months I’m going to be a professional.”

     

    O’Hanlon:   Okay.

     

    Monge:       So we will enroll people who are that young and there’s always like 1 out of you know 40 that are 18 or 19, however, across the county and coding bootcamps you’re right did start in all the major metros had their own coding bootcamps.

     

                                     We see people who are more about 21 to about 25. So it’s individuals that have some type of life experience, maybe they’ve worked a little bit, maybe they did some community college, or maybe they got a degree that didn’t allow them to really participate in the economy in a meaningful way. So we’ve met so many music majors, so many psychology majors, even people who have you know a general business degree you know might have a hard time finding their footing in the economy.

     

                                     So we find that people who have some type of life experience, whether you’ve worked in retail and now are a little more mature you know and you’re really thinking about,” Okay, I want a career that’s going to offer me a lot of opportunities,” those are really the people that we’ve seen across the country decide to participate in the coding bootcamp. I would venture to guess that it’s the space that’s a little more mature, it might move a little bit younger, but right now we haven’t seen a massive demand from the 18- or 19-year-olds.

     

    O’Hanlon:   Okay. So I know when you got started it was really a focus on getting the underrepresented communities, the Latina community and you know just addressing a need that was going to exist in the LA area, but what, have, have you seen that demographic changing with your bootcamps as you’ve progressed? Has, has it been less about making sure that you know these traditionally underrepresented communities and, and, but it’s become more of a kind of a general population that have been attending the bootcamps?

     

    Monge:       Yes, definitely. So we did see that big shift and especially you know in 2020 when COVID hit Sabio had to go into a hundred present live remote environment, right? So starting in April and May we really were able enroll a person who was in Texas, a person who was in Chicago, because all you needed was your laptop and strong access to the internet. So we have seen that the demographics of our coding bootcamp have become you know they’re very diverse. Where we will have you know Latinos, African Americans, we have a massive women in tech scholarship, we do a lot to try to encourage ladies to come to the program and support them post-graduation.

     

                                     But one of the things that we weren’t aware of when we started was that there’s actually a large military veteran population that is very well suited for coding. That we discovered maybe two or three years into the coding bootcamp. So now a good percentage of the people in the program are military veterans. So we’ll have people who actually live around the world, because veterans I don’t know have seen the world and they, they discover beautiful parts. And so it’s become a really diverse community in a unique way that we weren’t really anticipating.

     

                                     But what we want is basically our training room to look like America, right? An America super diverse, super fantastic and that’s who should be participating in the innovation economy. We think everyone should give it a consideration, give it thought, try it a little bit and decide for themselves if it’s something that they want to do professionally.

     

    O’Hanlon:   I, I think – I love that, I think that’s, that’s amazing that you guys are doing that. It’s interesting to think about. I, I have a 12-year-old son and you know he codes every day and he doesn’t even realize that he’s coding it, that he’s doing coding. We’re, you know I’m in awe of what he’s able to do on, on a regular basis. It’s not anything – I mean obviously I could learn how to code at some point, but I think we’re gonna, we’re, we’re kind of reaching this, this point in time where it’s not really going to be a question of, “Do you want to learn how to code,” it’s just you know you’re gonna learn how to code, it’s going to be kind of ingrained like you know like math or English or anything like that.

     

    Monge:       Right.

     

    O’Hanlon:   It’s just going to be part of, you know part of our everyday lives.

     

                                     So do you, do you foresee in the future that you might see kind of a shift in the, in people’s attitude regarding coding and, and you know and then you know maybe have as a result maybe your curriculum is going to be shifting into maybe other areas?

     

    Monge:       Yeah, so I think there’s opportunities on both sides. I mean we’ve seen that you know there’s been a national movement for Hour of Code, right?

     

    O’Hanlon:   Mm-hmm.

     

    Monge:       So in December during Computer Science Week most elementary kids will sit down and actively say like, “I am coding today.” So they’re developing the digital proficiency from an early age, which is fantastic.

     

                                     There are also a lot of after-school curricular activities that are related to coding and robotics. So I think that there has to be like you said a general understanding of what code is, how it operates, have some kind of fluency in it.

     

                                     There are also a lot of tools that help people do low-code automation, right? So there’s that development. But then there’s the development on the other side of the dumbbell which is you’re going to have a lot of AI and machine learning. We’re doing a lot of stuff with autonomous vehicles. I think I’ve seen that they, they showcased the tractor that’s a hundred percent autonomous, right? That the farmer’s controlling just with his phone.

     

    O’Hanlon:   Mm-hmm.

     

    Monge:       So I think there’s really exciting things that are happening across the spectrum, the technical spectrum and so it is going to become more incumbent for people to have some type of digital literacy and I think it just depends on how much…

     

                                     Right, like you and I probably I don’t know how much – like I never finished calculus, I could, I tried it, I could never get there.

     

    O’Hanlon:   [Laughs]

     

    Monge:       And now as an adult running a business I’m like, “What even is it,” right? Like do, who really needs it?

     

    O’Hanlon:   Right, right,

     

    Monge:       Versus, “I need algebra,” you need spreadsheets, you need concepts of finance. So I think it’s going to be something similar. There’s going to be a big spectrum. Does that make sense? Did I answer that?

     

    O’Hanlon:   Yeah, no, no, it, it makes, it makes total sense. You know you brought up AI and machine learning and other areas where we’re going to be heading.

     

                                     You know I was just talking to somebody earlier today about the metaverse and, and you know now that, now that we’ve got these entire you know universes that are being constructed virtually and people can actually interact and, and it’s nothing like Second Life. You know if anybody remembers Second Life 20 years ago people thought that that was going to be the next big thing and that was a big bust. But you know the metaverse and, and now companies are, are talking about using holograms to, to have you know interactions with other people.

     

    Monge:       Yeah.

     

    O’Hanlon:   There’s so many things that are going to be coming that, that just are kind of mind blowing. That we are going to need this next generation of you know the kids today who they are the next generation of coders and they’re the ones who are going to create these new universes for us and all these technologies and capabilities. So I think it’s really, really amazing that, that they’re getting this foundation now so that they can start kind of… They don’t have to think about the actual idea of coding, you know getting over that hurdle, they can just think about all of the possibilities that are, that are open to them and that they can provide to, to, to their customers in the future. So good stuff there.

     

                                     I love the idea that you know we’ve got, we’ve got these coding camps that do really give a nice foundational base to anybody and that’s, that’s an important thing. And anything that we can do to, to really blur the lines between equity and parity when it comes to underrepresented populations in technology I think is a really, really good thing.

     

                                     So Liliana I do want to thank you very much for what you guys are doing. I think it’s a great thing.

     

                                     If folks are interested in finding out more about the Sabio Bootcamps how can they get it? Do you have a website you want to point them to?

     

    Monge:       Yes, certainly. So it’s just our name: S-A-B-I-O-.L-A, because we started in Los Angeles. If you go to the website you’re going to find a bunch of different resources. We have a lot of introductory courses that are absolutely free, so that people can dip their toe in the water and say, “Okay, is this something that might interest me?”

     

                                     From what I’ve learned a lot of people really describe getting a little bug when they wrote something and something happens and they’re just like, “Oh wow.”

     

                                     But I think a lot of people are you know we’re, we’re makers, right? We, we evolve to work with our hands, to have tools and to build things, so this is one of those ways that we can really be creative and build something that other people can use or maybe you just build a solution for yourself that you really need, that no one else has built.

     

    O’Hanlon:   All right, well that’s, that’s such great stuff. I do appreciate it. Again, thanks for joining me today on TechStrong TV. Liliana thanks again for your time.

     

    Monge:       Thank you for having me.

     

    O’Hanlon:   All right everybody please stick around we’ve got lots more TechStrong TV coming up, so stay tuned.

     

    [End of Audio]

     

  • Ukraine Asks for DNS Censorship | Ukraine Snapchat Staff Danger | #BoycottKaspersky?

    Ukraine Asks for DNS Censorship | Ukraine Snapchat Staff Danger | #BoycottKaspersky?

    Welcome to Ukraine Week here at The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: Censoring the Russian internet, Snap fears for hundreds of Ukrainian employees, and Eugene Kaspersky acts like a ****.

    1. ICANN, but IWONT

    First up this week: Ukraine has asked ICANN to drop Russia from the DNS. Andrii Nabok, the Ukrainian representative of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee argues a DNS blockage would “help users seek for reliable information in alternative domain zones, preventing propaganda and disinformation.”

    Given today’s confirmation that Muscovite K12 students had been arrested for laying flowers at the Ukrainian embassy, this goal seems all the more laudable. But frankly, a moment’s thought says it’s a bad idea.

    Analysis: “The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”

    John Gilmore was right. Such a move would inevitably fail. And there’s a real risk of undesirable, unintended consequences.

    Kat Bouza and Noah Shachtman: Ukraine Pushes to Unplug Russia From the Internet

    Ukraine’s request to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) seeks to revoke domains issued in Russia and shut down primary Domain Name System (DNS) servers in the country. [It] would send a strong message to a regime pumping out digital propaganda.
    …
    The DNS root zone is a crucial element of the overall functionality of the internet, responsible for handling queries to top-level domains — such as .com, and country-specific domains like Russia’s .ru. Removing Russia’s access to this cluster of servers would prevent Russian internet-service providers from communicating.
    …
    But … the unprecedented request has the potential to do more harm than good. … Representatives for ICANN … declined to comment.


    But the request is pretty naïve, thinks this Anonymous Coward:

    All they would have to do is get the ISPs to add a zone to their DNS that says “ru. IN NS x.x.x.x” and then for all their users, any requests for a .ru domain would be directed to x.x.x.x

    OK, the rest of the world would miss out, but I doubt that they would care.


    Is there a better way? ArmoredDragon breathes fire:

    A better way … is to ask western certificate authorities to revoke all [Russian] certificates. Then ask the major OS and browser vendors to remove any CAs that don’t comply.

    That would really **** with them because there’s nothing [Russia] can do about that. And it would even **** with Russia’s ability to do business with Chinese companies and Chinese customers.

    2. Fear for 300 Ukraine Employees at Snap

    Snap, Inc.—formerly Snapchat—owns the Ukrainian company that created the technology used in the real-time video shenanigans behind “I’m not a cat.” It has hundreds of employees in Kyiv and Odesa.

    Analysis: Solidarity doesn’t Stop Wars, but Sanctions Might

    This very human DevOps story is but a footnote to the wider picture of tech companies acting to echo Western governments’ sanctions. It’ll cause us a little pain, but that’s nothing compared to the suffering felt by Ukrainians. And it’ll be worthwhile if it shortens the war.

    J. Clara Chan: Three hundred Snap employees are from Ukraine

    In a public note, … Snap — the parent company of Snapchat — said … that 300 of Snap’s “most creative and talented team members” are from Ukraine, … the birthplace of Looksery, the augmented reality platform that Snap acquired in 2015. … Snap said it has pledged over $15 million in humanitarian aid to support Ukraine. … The company is also providing emergency assistance to employees who need help safely relocating.
    …
    “We stand in solidarity with our Ukrainian team members and the people of Ukraine. … This is a devastating conflict with far-reaching consequences. … It is a direct threat to many of our team members and their families.
    …
    “Over many years working with our Ukrainian colleagues and friends, we have gotten to know the inventiveness, strength, and resilience of the Ukrainian people. … We will continue to work tirelessly to help our Ukrainian team members and their families, support our Snapchat community, and determine how we can help make positive contributions to the immense humanitarian efforts underway.”


    It’s bang on trend, reports Corinne Reichert:

    Snapchat has followed suit after Facebook, Twitter and YouTube began pausing ads on Friday, saying it has now stopped all advertising running in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. … The Snapchat app remains live in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, [but] Snap is monitoring the platform for misinformation or other misuse.
    …
    Apple has also halted sales of its products in Russia, as well as online transactions, Apple Pay and some Apple Maps features. Google [is] temporarily disabling some live Google Maps features, adding an SOS alert to Search and blocking Russian state-controlled media. It said Google Pay “may become unavailable.”


    But don’t hang up on Dade “+++ATH” Hayes: [ask your parents]

    In terms of any financial sacrifice from the foregone advertising opportunities, it isn’t clear that all that much is at stake for Snap. … While the company’s stance on the Russia-Ukraine situation clear and emphatic, it is also an easier one for for Snap to take than for many of its tech rivals.

    3. Yevgeny Valentinovich ‘Eugene’ Kaspersky has Chosen the Side of the Oppressor

    The figurehead eponym of AO Kaspersky Lab is being publicly shamed for comments he made about the war in Ukraine. In stark contrast to Snap’s statement, he is accused of overt neutrality, minimizing the war’s severity—and even of shoehorning in some marketing.

    Analysis: #BoycottKaspersky

    Desmond Tutu was right. But, while it’s tempting to “cancel” Eugene, dial down the emotion and think instead about your security posture. If you use Kaspersky products internally, what risks are you exposing your organization to? How might the Russian government exert pressure on the company to compromise your network?

    James Coker: Eugene Kaspersky’s Statement Provokes Controversy

    Cybersecurity industry veteran Eugene Kaspersky has provoked a strong reaction from leading figures in the sector. … Kaspersky, CEO of the Russian-headquartered IT security vendor of the same name, broke his silence on the conflict:
    …
    “We welcome the start of negotiations to resolve the current situation in Ukraine and hope that they will lead to a cessation of hostilities and a compromise. We believe that peaceful dialogue is the only possible instrument for resolving conflicts. War isn’t good for anyone. … The main thing we can do in this situation is provide uninterrupted functioning of our products and services.”
    …
    His description of the conflict as a “situation” and apparent attempt to advertise his firm led to a number of furious responses. … Following Kaspersky’s tweet, the hashtag #BoycottKaspersky appeared.


    With a balanced view, it’s Nick Farrell:

    Kaspersky sits on the fence … in Russia it is not a good idea to have a view. [But] whoever is advising Kaspersky on PR might need to have a rethink.
    …
    After all a compromise is [not] always possible when one side is firing missiles into residential areas. If he applied the same premise with ransomware, he would be suggesting, … “It is better that you talk to the people who are holding your servers hostage.” … How much is Kaspersky, the company, influenced by the Russian government?


    Does your shop use Kaspersky? Nick Lange cuts to the chase:

    I would like to remind all readers that, in case of war, … software with access to companies and the capacity to be updated worldwide in matter of hours at the same time is a high class target to get forced to cooperate by a autocratic government.

    The Moral of the Story: If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.


    You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.

    Image: Brandon Morales (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)

  • Shifting Engineering Priorities for 2022

    Shifting Engineering Priorities for 2022

    Nearly every aspect of the software development process is accelerating, from the increasing speed of programming languages to the expectation of faster delivery. This has resulted in the misconception that speed and efficiency should be a DevOps team’s or engineer’s top priority. Though agile transformations have been a central strategy for most organizations in recent years, investing in team culture while undergoing an agile overhaul is paramount to overall success.

    For many workers, the pandemic caused a shift in priorities, so much so that as we begin to emerge from the events of the last two years, almost a quarter of UK workers are planning job changes and businesses are tackling the so-called Great Resignation. A desire to improve work-life balance and enjoy better benefits like flexible working has made employees more likely to leave a job. As such, maintaining employee satisfaction and protecting team mental health should be a top priority for companies wanting to keep retention rates high.

    This starts with leadership, and engineering and DevOps leaders must have full transparency into their teams, with an understanding of exactly what motivates them. With this in mind, here are three top priorities for engineering and DevOps leaders in 2022.

    1. Prioritize Team Culture

    The tech sector is notorious for a high employee turnover rate, with a LinkedIn report putting it at 13.2%, far above other industries. For engineers especially, the increased pressure to deliver at lightning speed has created an unsustainable “churn and burn” culture.

    Simultaneously, engineers have no shortage of options when it comes to job prospects as demand is booming. In fact, this particular sector in England and Wales advertised more job vacancies in 2021 than all British businesses across 2020.

    To avoid any leavers, it’s important for engineering leaders to establish a unique and engaging culture within their teams, and actively and continuously examine it to ensure that engineers feel supported and valued.

    However, there are a few key principles shared across world-class engineering teams. Allowing engineers to work on projects that excite them and allow them to explore their creativity is crucial. This may involve giving them dedicated time to work on developing their skills and pursuing innovative projects. In addition, leaders should cultivate a culture for their engineering teams that is built around appreciation, collaboration and psychological safety. Weaving open and honest career discussion and satisfaction check-ins into one-on-one meetings will help employees feel listened to and motivated by their personal progression.

    2. Use Data as Your Gut Check

    Ensuring decisions are data-driven is also incredibly important. The best leaders are often those who use concrete evidence to strengthen their teams. Engineering leaders must use data and metrics to gauge the health of their teams in the current jobs landscape.

    Even for engineering leaders, a team’s day-to-day programming can sometimes seem like a black box, so finding clear insights about the development process is imperative. With an engineering metrics solution, it is possible to obtain better visibility into your team’s workflow. This not only helps ensure efficiency and quality, but it can also help to gauge employee success and morale.

    Continuous health monitoring using a robust set of metrics will provide leaders with early identification and help to resolve any friction. A data-driven platform to ensure that individuals’ contributions are ‘seen’ is fundamental. Monitoring a teams’ daily workflow helps to identify standout employees that may otherwise fly under the radar, as well as flagging those who may be struggling. It’s important to pay particular attention to metrics that drive employees toward their professional goals and help to remove bottlenecks across teams.

    Prioritizing constructive feedback and one-on-one conversations with employees is crucial to employee success and retention. The focus must be on frequent check-ins with engineers to ensure that they are thriving personally and professionally.

    3. Focus on People First, Rather Than Performance

    Nothing will ever be as important within a team as the people. Only the engineering and DevOps leaders who prioritize people through a variety of tools and techniques will reap the rewards and stay ahead of the competition.

    Recent research has shown that happy employees are up to 12% more productive.

    An engineering team will deliver their best work when they feel encouraged by leaders, have the space and autonomy to work in a meaningful way and have accomplishments acknowledged and celebrated.

    As leaders, it is critical to remember to check in with team members as people, before checking in with them as workers.

    Engineering leaders will likely be battling for in-demand talent in 2022 and beyond as they continue to contend with the Great Resignation. In the face of this, there is a real opportunity for leaders to distinguish teams through their engineering culture. Whether you are cognizant of it or not, a team has a culture. It’s incumbent upon engineering leaders to make having a people-first culture the top priority in 2022.

  • Akamai: Buying Linode | Firefox: Not OK | Gone: Google Vaccine Mandate

    Akamai: Buying Linode | Firefox: Not OK | Gone: Google Vaccine Mandate

    Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: Linode gets bought by Akamai, Firefox market share is “measly,” and Google brings staff back to the office.

    1. Akamai + Aker = ‘Synergy’

    First up this week: Why is Akamai buying Linode? Whatever the reason, it’s a big payday for its solitary shareholder: Not far off a billion dollars.

    Analysis: There goes the neighborhood?

    The 100 lb gorilla of edge computing and CDNs is promising not to mess with Linode’s winning open source cloud formula: No change, steady as she goes, etcetera. But how many times have we heard that before?

    Here’s local scribbler Paige Gross: Linode’s $900M acquisition by Akamai is a ‘game changer’

    A household name in the Philly tech scene … CEO Christopher Aker founded the company in 2003, and it’s been bootstrapped ever since, growing to about 250 employees. … Aker has owned 100% of Linode since he founded it.
    …
    Aker said the deal brings the company closer to solving evolving challenges “as cloud services become all-encompassing, including compute, storage, security and delivery from core to edge. … We’ve been talking about ‘alternative cloud’ — alternative to the big guy — and now we’ve sort of validated ourself in this market.”
    …
    The Old City company maintains “well over a million accounts” but has anywhere around 150,000 active users of its platform at any particular time. Linode’s HQ, the bank building at Third and Arch Streets, remains. … For clients and Linode employees, there won’t be too much noticeable change [Linode] says.


    Why does Akamai want Linode? Jonathan Greig asked the CEO:

    Akamai CEO Tom Leighton [explained] that Linode has great customer support and is already in 11 locations, which Akamai is going to “dramatically” expand. … Leighton also noted the September 2021 acquisition of Israel-based Guardicore, a cybersecurity company that offers a micro-segmentation solution to reduce the potential attack surface of corporate networks, secure applications, and meet compliance standards.
    …
    According to Leighton, the company is expecting the cloud compute category — which includes edge applications, its net storage business, and Linode — to reach “well over half a billion dollars in 2023. … We were pioneers in edge computing and now we’re taking a big step forward in cloud computing with Linode.”


    But here’s a worried-sounding zoid.com:

    Well good for them but I hope [Akamai] don’t screw it up. Linode is a great hosting company.

    2. Firefox isn’t OK

    Last week, a journalist innocently asked, “Is Firefox OK?” And people lost their minds.

    Analysis: No, not OK—it’s a big problem for DevOps and the web.

    We need Firefox and Gecko. A Chromium monoculture is bad for the web and bad for DevOps. (Before you ask: No, the existence of WebKit doesn’t change things, thanks to Apple’s ridiculous policies). Much as I tried to say something nice about Firefox last month, its market share is, frankly, pathetic.

    Matt Burgess: Is Firefox OK?

    In the two decades since Firefox launched from the shadows of Netscape … the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market—on mobile it’s a measly half a percent. … Its fate also has larger implications for the web as a whole.
    …
    Each year Google pays Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties. … In its 2020 financial results … Mozilla listed its total revenue as $496 million. … The Google-Mozilla deal was last renewed in 2020 and is expected to expire in 2023. … Mozilla and Firefox acknowledge that for its long-term future it needs to diversify the ways it makes money.
    …
    Firefox still matters: … The browser market is dominated by Google’s Chromium codebase and its underlying browser engine, Blink. … Microsoft’s Edge Browser, Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera all use adapted versions of Chromium. Apple [has] its WebKit browser engine [but] other than that, Firefox’s Gecko browser engine is the only alternative.


    Firefox, how do we love thee? Let not_count_zero count the ways:

    I still use Firefox because:
    a) I remember Internet Explorer and the standards wars. …
    b) I don’t trust Google. …
    c) Most sites work well.
    …
    I do have questions though. … They’re currently getting around a half a billion‽ What are they doing with it? … This seems really off—really, really off.


    But heed a deeply worried Thom Holwerda:

    The decline and potential demise of Firefox is a massive problem that everybody seems to be kind of tiptoeing around—too afraid to acknowledge that if Firefox were indeed to disappear, we’d be royally screwed. We’d end up right back where we started 20 years ago, with Chrome being the new IE6.
    …
    The situation is especially dire for … Linux users, developers, and distribution makers. … Gnome Browser or KDE’s Falkon can barely be taken seriously, and … are based on Apple’s WebKit, which isn’t a great position to be in.

    3. Google’s Return to Work Plan Drops Vaccine Mandate

    Google is planning “celebrations” to welcome back employees after being fully remote. And in practice—unlike at IBM—this doesn’t mean a vaccine mandate.

    Analysis: Vocal minority wins—or do they?

    It was just three months ago that Google said it “firmly stands behind our vaccination policy.” What changed? It’s unlikely to have been due to a tiny minority of staff publishing a manifesto.

    Jennifer Elias: Google relaxes mandates

    The company will no longer require vaccination as a condition of employment … as it prepares to bring workers back to the office … at least three days a week for a “hybrid” work model. … The company [had previously] told employees that they must comply with vaccine policies or they’d face loss of pay and eventually loss of employment.
    …
    According to Google spokesperson Lora Lee Erickson … the company dropped the requirement … after removing the Jan. 18 deadline it had set for employees to either get vaccinated or get exemption approval. She declined to provide further details on the policy or the reasons for the reversal.
    …
    Google Real Estate and Workplace Services VP David Radcliffe [said Google] is preparing to begin its 30-day transition period to the hybrid work week if conditions continue to improve. He said his team is planning “celebrations” to welcome back employees. … Unvaccinated employees who are approved to enter offices will still need to follow additional protocols, including testing and wearing a mask.


    It’s too simplistic to say the anti-mandate brigade are also anti-vaxxers. For example, raxxorrax:

    I am vaccinated and HR knows this. … But if they officially demanded a certificate, I think I would have called it quits. Many people don’t have that option [but] there are consequences for such unreasonable demands.
    …
    I understand a mandate for vaccinations in certain occupations relating to health. It is something you have to personally accept if you want to work in the field.


    Although a few others are way over at the end of the bell curve. Greg Jinkerson:

    Don’t get excited, [Google is] still evil and stupid. … Now they’re backing down for some reason, [but] this is barely anything notable as far as a rollback of restrictions. [It] is not any kind of encouraging news.

    The Moral of the Story: Failure is the foundation of success—and the means by which it is achieved.


    You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.

    Image: Aleksey Kuprikov (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)

  • Top Nine Skills for SREs to Master

    Top Nine Skills for SREs to Master

    It’s easy to talk at a high level about what site reliability engineers do: They ensure that IT systems achieve availability and performance requirements.

    But which skills, exactly, do SREs need to do to perform their jobs? That’s a more complicated question.

    To answer, let’s look at the top nine site reliability engineer skills that modern SREs (or aspiring SREs) should master. Although SRE skills may vary from one team to the next depending on the types of systems managed and the main types of reliability challenges faced, virtually all SREs need a core set of standard skills that allow them to understand and manage the type of complex, distributed systems they will have to support at the typical organization today.

    Here’s a breakdown of top SRE skills.

    Networking Expertise for SREs

    The network plays a pivotal role in connecting modern, distributed environments. As such, it’s often the culprit when something goes wrong—a lesson that Facebook, for example, learned when a networking problem brought down its entire global infrastructure.

    Situations like this are why SREs should master networking concepts. Even if their organization also employs networking engineers, site reliability engineers need a deep understanding of networking themselves to know when the network is the root cause of an incident and how to resolve network-caused issues effectively.

    Linux and Unix

    If you come from a Windows background but you want to be an SRE, there’s no getting around it: You’ll need to learn how to work with Linux and other Unix-like systems in addition to Windows.

    That’s because, even at organizations that don’t rely heavily on Linux servers, you’re likely to find that Linux and Unix concepts are deeply embedded within other systems that you have to work with. Most public cloud management tools follow the conventions of Linux CLI tools, for example. So do systems like Docker and Kubernetes, even if you run them in a Windows environment.

    Cloud Computing

    Like Linux and networking, cloud computing is another category of skill that modern SREs can’t live without.

    The reason why is almost self-explanatory: Around 90% of businesses use the cloud, and you can’t manage reliability for cloud environments very well if you don’t understand cloud architectures, cloud networking, cloud data storage, cloud observability and so on.

    CI/CD Pipelines

    SREs don’t typically help to develop software, but they nonetheless need a deep understanding of how software is written and deployed—which, at most organizations, today, is a process that happens via a CI/CD pipeline.

    It’s hard to engineer reliability if you don’t know how to address reliability problems that emerge from application source code or deployment processes. Understanding how CI/CD processes work and which tools drive them is key for virtually every SRE today.

    Quality Assurance and Software Testing Automation

    SREs also don’t usually help to test software pre-deployment. That task falls to developers or quality assurance engineers.

    Nonetheless, understanding how software is tested—and how to use test automation to speed tests and expand test coverage—is a vital SRE skill. After all, the more thoroughly and efficiently your team can test software, the greater your chances of catching reliability problems pre-deployment, when they are easier to fix and pose a much lower risk to the business.

    Security Engineering and Response

    Securing is another domain that SREs don’t “own,” but where they nonetheless require significant skills.

    Indeed, good reliability engineering makes security a priority, and vice versa. SREs who don’t understand security fundamentals are at risk of implementing reliability solutions that are effective from a reliability standpoint, but not necessarily secure.

    DevOps

    Although SREs are not DevOps engineers, SRE and DevOps are closely related domains. SREs at most organizations today will be expected to understand DevOps concepts and, in many cases, work alongside DevOps teams.

    So, plan to master DevOps skills as part of your site reliability engineer skills acquisition strategy.

    Incident Management

    Perhaps the single most important type of skill for SREs to learn is incident management. Although many roles may participate in incident response, SREs usually take the lead in organizing the incident response team, communicating with stakeholders and devising the best strategy for resolving each incident as quickly as possible.

    This means SREs should know how incident response roles are structured and understand incident response concepts. They should also be familiar with incident response platforms that automate the complex processes required to ensure rapid, effective incident resolution.

    Managing Postmortems

    In addition to overseeing incident response, SREs may be tasked with managing post mortems. Knowing how to run a postmortem—as well as when a postmortem is necessary, and when it makes sense to use a “blameless” postmortem approach—is an essential SRE skill.

    The list of SRE skills could certainly go on. Above are only the most fundamental types of skills SREs will need for most modern environments. But if you’re just starting out on your journey to becoming an SRE, the nine skill domains described above are a good place to begin acquiring the knowledge you’ll need to excel in an SRE career.

  • Can Regulatory Mandates Secure Software Development?

    Can Regulatory Mandates Secure Software Development?

    Software companies have a long history of delivering incomplete and insecure products. This happens for a couple of reasons. Fast time-to-market has always been a business priority, taking precedence over security, especially as DevOps has become the norm in software development methodologies. And software, by nature, is easy to update and change, so some defects or oversights could be allowed to slide through with the thought that “We can always fix it later.”

    Unlike car manufacturers that put a premium on including safety features upfront (or face the heavy hand of regulators), software makers have typically emphasized speed to market as a way to stay competitive.

    But the other shoe often drops on that approach in the form of costly recalls, extensive patch programs, cybersecurity breaches, and other issues. The fix-it-later mentality in software has become increasingly challenging in recent years with the emergence of connected/IoT devices that are harder to keep current and have a greater impact. Connected closed-circuit surveillance cameras, for example, are frequently hunted and exploited on the internet to spy on people. Internet of things (IoT) devices operating at dams or nuclear power plants can now be hacked (as seen at the Bowman Avenue Dam in New York, or three utility companies in Ukraine hit by BlackEnergy malware). And, across the board, the cost of data breaches continues to rise.

    A White House executive order (EO) from 2021 is also putting pressure on software manufacturers, DevOps and DevSecOps professionals to improve quality, with a mandate for U.S. federal agencies to enforce secure software development through their contracts and acquisitions as part of efforts to secure the software supply chain. The core difference between this effort versus previous attempts such as FISMA, is the visibility into the software development process.

    The attention being paid to secure software development is a step in the right direction, but ultimately it’s still up to the industry rather than regulatory bodies, to change the mindset toward building secure software from the ground up.

    Technology is Faster Than Mandates

    The EO represents a shift in the landscape, mandating not just secure products, but secure development practices. Although it applies officially to federal civilian agencies and their contractors, federal regulations and other government mandates often become global standards, as has happened with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU’s privacy and security law.

    But regulatory mandates aren’t enough. They often move too slowly to be a real solution, especially in a software development environment that is moving steadily towards more agile, fast-paced environments where continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) is the norm. The timelines for new regulations typically require a two-year window for implementation; if a company already has an applicable product in use, it could be up to five years before they’re required to be in full compliance, such as in the payment industry. By that time, the key elements of the industry best practices have already changed. Simply put, technology moves too fast for regulatory bodies to keep up.

    What’s more, the regulations themselves could ultimately fall short if they are perceived to have a high cost burden of compliance. This is specifically true if the technology used in the software development life cycle can’t keep pace with the needs of compliance. In support of the EO, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released Draft Special Publication (SP) 800-218, and, as is routine, accepted open public comments. The feedback from industry consortiums in these situations often includes considerations about the costs of implementing new regulations and can sometimes lead to softening of some aspects, arguing, for example, that the new regulations put an unfair burden on small and mid-sized companies. The final set of regulations can sometimes leave the door open for ways to address compliance without addressing the issues that led to the regulation in the first place.

    For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is widely hailed as the nation’s strictest set of privacy protections, yet it still has its weaknesses. The most commonly cited weakness is that the law makes it extremely difficult for consumers to take advantage of the new regulations when they feel they have been wronged.

    Industry Must Make it Happen

    Ultimately, it is up to software manufacturers and the industry to improve the security of their software. They should adopt best practices to build secure procedures into the design, development, testing and validation of new software, as well as its deployment and use. NIST’s Secure Software Development Framework is one example of guidance, being drawn from recommendations from groups like BSA, OWASP, and SAFECode. Industry groups, such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), could adopt standards for development and certification similar to the universally accepted UL standards for electrical products.

    The rising demand for secure development requires a substantial shift in attitudes toward how software is made. A lot of these things can be more easily implemented if organizations invest in the adaptation of new technologies faster.

    The threat landscape has become too sophisticated and pernicious for the problem of insecure software to be ignored. Fix-it-later is no longer a valid option if organizations want to protect their networks and, especially, their data, which has become the lifeblood of operations in every sector. While regulatory mandates help, the job ultimately falls to the software industry itself and its consortium of like-minded people bridging the gap between developers and DevOps teams of competing companies to ultimately deliver what’s best for the consumers.

  • Inclusivity & Diversity in the Workplace – Techstrong TV

    Inclusivity & Diversity in the Workplace – Techstrong TV

    Eamon will discuss ServiceNow’s new cross-functional organization – Center of Excellence for Accessibility – to make the Now Platform more inclusive for a wide range of diverse needs as well as why Eamon was chosen as the new VP & Global Head of Accessibility. The video and a transcript of the conversation are below.

    Moderator:                 This is Digital Anarchist.

     

    Alan Shimel:               Hey everyone. Welcome to another Techstrong TV segment. I have a first-time guest on here I want to introduce you to. His name is Eamon McErlean. I did it so good off camera, and I messed it up. Eamon, say it right for me.

     

    Eamon McErlean:      Eamon McErlean.

     

    Alan Shimel:               Eamon McErlean. Okay. Eamon, now that we’ve got your name, why don’t you give people a little bit of your background, your current position and a little bit of who you are?

     

    Eamon McErlean:      Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Alan. Appreciate it. Yep, Eamon McErlean. As you can probably tell from the name, born and raised in Northern Ireland, just outside Belfast. Been working in the IT industry now for about 25 years, overall, 26 years. Did seven years at Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, based in Miami, after [crosstalk].

     

    Alan Shimel:               My neck of the woods.

     

    Eamon McErlean:      By your neck of the woods, exactly. Then ended up doing a startup with a couple of business partners, which lasted about four years. To supplement that startup, I did a lot of consulting work. And the last consulting gig I did was with Apple. And after six months, I ended up taking a full-time role at Apple. We moved over to the Bay Area.

     

    Did 7.5 years in Apple global retail under Ron Johnson and his team, which was phenomenal. And then up to about just over four years ago got an opportunity to move up here to Portland, Oregon to join Nike, to run Nike’s quality, automation, analytics. And then that transitioned into deployments and support with Nike’s phenomenal digital team.

     

    And ultimately, about the end of October, I decided to move on to where I’m at now, which is VP and global head of accessibility for ServiceNow. So currently, I’ve been in this role, like literally, this is my three-month anniversary.

     

    Alan Shimel:               Congratulations.

     

    Eamon McErlean:      That’s my history. Yep.

     

    Alan Shimel:               That’s fantastic. You’ve been blessed. You’ve worked with some great companies, some great brands. I live down here in South Florida. There’s a lot of cruise lines down here, but Royal Caribbean has, there’s a certain quality to the Royal Caribbean brands that may be. And I’m not bad mouthing any other cruise lines, please don’t yell at me, but there’s quality within the cruise industry.

     

    But then, obviously, going out to a place like Apple, you want to talk about quality, and Nike. Nike was doing digital transformations before it was cool. And they’ve led the way there too. Even I remember I was involved in the TechStars program. And there was a Nike TechStars, TechStars just for Nike at one point where it was helping to develop.

     

    They were looking for companies that were developing apps for the Nike technology. It was pretty cool stuff. But this role at ServiceNow is a little different, around accessibility. I make a habit of trying to talk to people who have these up-and-coming new roles, especially at an executive level.

     

    For instance, I have a friend I’ve spoken to a number of times, I think it’s at Twilio, where she’s chief of corporate responsibility. Doing good for the world, using the corporation’s assets and roles. Let’s talk about this accessibility, Eamon. In your mind talking to people, what’s really your job? What’s your aim here?

     

    Eamon McErlean:      I think my introduction to accessibility started at Nike working with the retail stores. I had the good fortune of working with many companies or many departments within Nike. But ultimately, we had an initiative going called a career experience. And that career experience enabled our retail store team members to come to WHQ help us test, help us validate new features, gets feedback of product owners.

     

    And we realized when we were doing that that we hadn’t brought in enough adapted users or people with disabilities to follow the path side of it. And when we went to the stores, honestly Alan, to see the challenges that some of our team members at Apple faced with our applications, we jumped on that and said, listen, we need to do better here, we need to improve accessibility.

     

    That was about six, seven years ago. I had limited knowledge of accessibility at that time. But it’s something that really appealed to me. I think when you see it firsthand, the impact that it can have to an end user, I think that empathy instantaneously is awoke. And from my perspective, I knew there was something that I wanted to go after.

     

    Two and a half, three years later, and my transition to Nike and Morgan with a few of the phenomenal team members that followed me came with me to go from Apple to Nike. We realized pretty quickly that we need to address accessibility of Nike. I got phenomenal support from the Nike leadership team, especially from a lady called Holly Newton.

     

    And it was then that we started to build the team around quality and accessibility and automation. But we have a dedicated team towards accessibility. And that grew. We were able to hire a director and build that team up. And literally, what happened about just over a year ago, I hit a certain age website, without going into too many details, and I realized this is something I want to do. This is something that I really want to dedicate myself to.

     

    Alan Shimel:               I know about those ages.

     

    Eamon McErlean:      And rather than doing something that not that I have to do, some work that we have to do, but this is something I truly wanted to do going forward. I was fortunate enough to go into the ServiceNow. The leadership team that I’ve met at ServiceNow and their passion for accessibility and how we want to drive it, which I can discuss, has been phenomenal. It has just progressed smoothly, thankfully, and fairy intuitive and lucky fashion for myself, I would say.

     

    Alan Shimel:               Absolutely. Let me dig in here a little bit. When you’re in a retail environment, an Apple store, or Nike store, accessibility is at a physical level. You’ve got to make sure your doors are wide enough. That there’s [inaudible] or special seating. That’s physical, but there’s also hearing issues, sometimes sight issues, communication issues.

     

    But in a retail environment, it’s had a very physical human to human interface level. Then there’s another accessibility and it is accessibility that I’ve been aware of, and I dealt with on a very periphery old matter. I was designing websites when Netscape was in beta. So going back to 94 maybe, 95 something like that. Shortly after that, was it the 508 accessibilities for screens?

     

    Eamon McErlean:      Right, yep.

     

    Alan Shimel:               Where you had to have, if people couldn’t see images, but it read the alt tag or certain navigational tools for hearing impaired, sight impaired, people who maybe couldn’t control a keyboard or mouse or what have you. And to me, that was machine to person accessibility. You had to have good user design so that a person can interact with that machine with that website. Different than physical in-person kind of stuff.

     

    We think of ServiceNow as a digital company. You don’t have ServiceNow stores in the mall. Not yet, anyway. So let’s talk about what’s the mission at ServiceNow. It’s a different mission than the Nike store or the Apple store.

     

    Eamon McErlean:      It is. Very much so. And it’s as important to make that distinguishment because ultimately, you’re right. When people think about accessibility, that’s the first thing they think of. Can the wheelchair go through the front door? Do we have enough space? Are the restrooms accessible?

     

    But when you go on and start working with a platform company, and as broad as we are, the platform of platforms, it’s a whole different world. And the way that we look at it, is we need to be able to create the optimal consumer journey for every single user independent on their disability. And we work through different companies, W3C, WCAG, the WCAG consortium and conformance that we like to adhere to.

     

    But ultimately, it’s all about working with the people with disabilities. They are the experts, they truly are. And when we start now going forward, we have a multi-tenant approach, meaning it’s not just going in there and fixing issues. Going in there and fixing issues isn’t going to get us to where we need to be. We have to be able to embed accessibility compliance as part of our software development lifecycle.

     

    Because if we don’t do that, we would never going to end up getting to where we want to be. There’s awareness factor, I’m sure you know about unconscious bias training as an example in the HR world. It’s mandatory for every employee. We’re pushing at ServiceNow to make accessibility training for everybody at ServiceNow, for every employee, so they understand the basic principles.

     

    How we communicate with our customers, we want to ensure that we’re going to create a customer hub, a customer awareness board so we really build that overall engagement. The wonderful thing about accessibility community as a whole, it’s the most sharing, giving community everywhere in the word. We’re not sharing it, we put all the work into this, we’re not giving it to you, it’s the opposite.

     

    It’s truly extremely collaborative community. But ultimately, everything that you mentioned, be it from visibility, and being able to use screen readers, cognitive and the way the pages are laid out. Even the color of the screens, it’s everything that we do going forward will have that accessibility mindset in mind.

     

    But one thing I will add sometimes, is when you create something to ensure accessibility compliance, sometimes it actually helps everybody, because it can actually be an ultimate goal for all users. So we never just like thinking, okay, we’re just taking it for regular users and taking it for working with people with disabilities, we want to look at it holistically.

     

    Alan Shimel:               Alright, I think that makes sense. That was the lesson I learned, Eamon, for a long time. I’ve been an Apple user for a while, and I think Windows has it too, they have certain accessibility features that are not turned on by default. And for a long time, I would not even open that folder to see what they were. Because I said thank God, I don’t have any disabilities, and I don’t need them.

     

    And then one day, probably by mistake, I found myself in there. And some of the things in those accessibility options, I found really helpful. I’m not ashamed to say it, and I’ve turned them on ever since, because I like them. Easier on the eyes, easier on the ears, sometimes as you said, you get a little older. I think there is a lesson there that a lot of accessibility options are actually mainstream as well.

     

    I want to talk about a different kind of disabilities, I’ll get your opinion on that. So we have a lot of folks with physical disabilities, whether it’s eye, vision, hearing, cognitive. Then we have a lot of folks who are on the spectrum, for instance, the autism spectrum, or have some other mental kind of, I guess that’s sort of cognitive.

     

    These principles we’re talking about get built into ServiceNow. But they also trickle and find their way into all the companies that are using ServiceNow at their organization. It’s not just confined to the however many 10s of 1000s of people ServiceNow has employed, it’s all the customers of ServiceNow.

     

    Eamon McErlean:      That’s exactly why I took this role, because as phenomenal a company as Nike is and the millions of users satisfied customers Nike has, but ServiceNow will be up to 17,000 employees in a short period of time, but all of their own customers and then their customers have that exponential growth impact that we will have overall.

     

    So basically, from the accessibility standpoint, you have visual, auditory, speech, cognitive breakdowns. And from a cognitive perspective, you were looking at more of a understanding of how things flow but making sure that we’re not making it too busy as well. You don’t want to have a list of 40 items for people to flip through. You want it to be as we talked about before, as intuitive as possible from a user flow.

     

    The platform itself is extremely comprehensive that guys can do. But you can make it as complex or you can make it as simple as you wish, depending on what you want to do and your persona, if you will. Moving forward, I’ve always thought this crazy thought about computers and software and UI, UX. And even as it relates to media and an ongoing pierce.

     

    Right now, we were looking at the screen. Everybody does between six, eight, ten, twelve hours a day. I’ve always thought in the crazy term, how can we make that screentime have a positive impact on people’s lives holistically. And you don’t want to make it in a gamified way, but we should be able to make it, and we’re smart enough to make it in a way that somehow it helps people and a little bit every day.

     

    Again, we know the negative impact that can have while having that much screen time. It could be as simple as like, man, you need to walk away right now, you need to take a break, or here’s, I’m going to play your favorite song while you meditate for three minutes, or it could be anything.

     

    But unless we do that soon, I think we are going on the bad road as it relates to constant screen time and not that personal time. That ties into the cognitive area as well, I really do. And certainly, I think we need to address some of them later.

     

    Alan Shimel:               I tell you my thoughts on that one, Eamon. Who does it affect the most? It’s the opposite ends of our population. It’s the young people. You got to pry their screens out of their cold dead stiff fingers. They don’t put those phones down. I had my boys home from college, we went out to dinner.

     

    And it’s like, hey, man, you are home for the weekend with your parents, we’re out to dinner, put your phone away and be present, be present, be here. There’s definitely a problem there. But I’m involved in another organization that’s looking at technology in seniors. You start getting a lot of people with dementia or memory issues or what have you.

     

    And they can get sucked into that screen. And it could just as easily be watching movies as it is reading things online or playing games. And the beauty of it is there’s actually good things you could do to help improve memory with computer programs and stuff. But doing that versus just mindlessness, it affects them. So it affects the older and the young more than those people in the middle. And those are too at-risk populations, if you will.

     

    Eamon McErlean:      Completely agree. And I think, unfortunately, social media hasn’t thought upon in the most positive light, let’s say. But I think we as a culture have an opportunity to address that. I think we need to address that; I really do. Because I’ve got college-aged kids myself.

     

    And I know what it’s like when it’s just that constant, I don’t want to say attraction, but pretty close to attraction to the screen time. We have to address that. But the more like COVID, is a perfect example, we’re not physically getting together anymore. We’re doing X amount of hours on Zoom on the screen a today, I think it becomes more and more relevant.

     

    Alan Shimel:               I’ll tell you something on that, Eamon, though. And this is my own sherry, I might be crazy. I think what’s going on with COVID and the amount of time we spent on Zooms and stuff like this has taught a lot of people a lesson. That this is not the equivalent of sitting down and having a beer with someone or drinking a coffee or just sitting and talking in person eye-to-eye.

     

    This is good if that’s all you got. But everyone I talk to is dying to get back out to conferences in-person, to interact with real people and see, do they have legs beneath that screen? Real interactions. At the beginning of COVID, everyone was like, oh thank God for Zoom. Look at Zoom stock, it was through the roof.

     

    Thank God For this whole virtual world and the metaverse and whatever else we were calling it. But I think people are fatigued from it. And they’ve learned that this is a poor substitute for real life, for real in-person.

     

    Eamon McErlean:      It’s just not the same, Alan. It’s not. It’s really not the same. And what concerns me is there is a certain age group, back to the age group, there’s a certain age group that when I hear our sons or other kids talking about my friends, I’m hanging out with my friends all the time. Well, they’re not actually physically hanging out with their friends.

     

    Alan Shimel:               No, they’re not.

     

    Eamon McErlean:      They’re not hanging out with their friends here.

     

    Alan Shimel:               That’s same goal with that, yeah.

     

    Eamon McErlean:      Unfortunately, a certain age group, the longer this goes on, it’s a skill set to being able to socialize when in an environment with physical people, if people do have concerns about that or anxious about that. The longer this goes on, the worse that gets overall as well, that anxiety.

     

    To me, I’ve always been a people person. I always love physically meeting people and standing and looking at them and being there. I think there’s health impacts across the board. And I think, to your point, there’s multiple ways we can address it. I just think we shouldn’t ignore it. That’s the biggest thing.

     

    Alan Shimel:               Agreed. Agreed, agreed, agreed. Anyway, hey Eamon, we’re probably way over time, I wasn’t paying attention. But for people who want to find out more about what ServiceNow is doing around accessibility and stuff like that, is there a place on their website that they can get information?

     

    Eamon McErlean:      Under servicenow.com, we should have an area for accessibility. If we don’t, please, through this communication here, I can forward all my contact information, @eamon [crosstalk]

     

    Alan Shimel:               We will try to put it in the notes. But that will always great man. And Eamon, look, this is really good work. As you said, you get to a certain point in life and just getting up to go to a job every day. If you have to, you have to but you die young. Doing something you’re passionate about that you think makes a difference in the world, it’s not working well, it’s following your passion. I’m happy to see you be able to follow your passion, man. It’s a great thing.

     

    Eamon McErlean:      I really, really appreciate that. The last thing about sharing my information, please do because the one thing I’ve learned a bit this role is you have to be humble. You have to understand we don’t have all the answers. The users with disabilities are the experts themselves, and we have to listen to them more than anybody else.

     

    So any advice, feedback, lessons learned, lesson sharing, we are always willing to take as much advice and feedback as possible. So I’ll throw that out there. And Alan, listen, thanks for visibility. We’re trying to do the right thing here.

     

    Alan Shimel:               We appreciate it.

     

    Eamon McErlean:      Cooperation like this help. We really do appreciate it.

     

    Alan Shimel:               Good, man. Eamon, best of luck. Come back and keep us posted.

     

    Eamon McErlean:      I will. Thanks guys.

     

    Alan Shimel:               Thank you my friend. We’re going to take a break here on Techstrong TV. We’re going to be right back with another guest shortly.

     

    [End of Audio]

     

  • Best Practices to Improve your Engineering Sprints

    Best Practices to Improve your Engineering Sprints

    What is the purpose of sprints? We break work into sprints so we can more easily monitor, estimate and predict what we want to ship and when. Over the years, engineering teams have gotten used to moving quickly from one sprint to the next, but I think it’s important to be more thoughtful in how we plan and execute sprints.

    Running effective and successful sprints can define whether or not your organization is able to ship high-quality software fast and often. It also gives teams more flexibility and the ability to quickly change something that is not working or, on the other hand, to iterate on a successful technology. 

    After almost 20 years as an engineer, manager and as a CTO, I have found there are several best practices that improve the sprints that are part of my team’s software development life cycle. 

    Sprint Planning

    When planning a sprint, there are several things to keep in mind.

    Make Sure the Work Aligns with Business Priorities

    There are always a number of elements an engineering team can focus on during any given sprint. It’s fairly easy to lose sight of the business’ end goal. Make sure to gut-check to make sure that the sprint goals align with current business priorities.

    Ensure the Workload is Balanced From the Start

    This seems like an obvious statement, but make sure team members have equivalent workloads so you avoid burnout. It is also important to understand how different engineers on the team work—some people work best by selecting their own tasks with items that are unassigned, some pick up unfinished tasks as they finish others and some prefer to be assigned certain tasks because they have specialized skills. 

    Don’t Underestimate the Time That Interruptions/Additions Take 

    Along the same lines as the above, don’t overlook this for several reasons. Without adequate, data-driven insight into the actual state of each team member’s workload, it is almost impossible to gauge what’s happening in real-time. While business-critical sprints are assumed to take priority, side projects, Slack interruptions and meetings can easily consume an engineer’s day. Make sure to proactively check that each member has enough true deep work time without becoming burned out. 

    Don’t Underestimate the Time it Takes to get Things to a Done State

    Sometimes engineering teams only look at the development stage, but the full cycle required for the software to get to the end user might take longer. Allotting the right amount of time to get the job done across all phases of development will help avoid unexpected surprises. 

    When You Get to Mid-Sprint

    Monitor Unplanned Work

    Initial planning doesn’t necessarily take into account the bugs and fire drills that will likely arise after the sprint starts. Pay close attention to any mid-sprint additions and adjust as necessary. There may be team members who have cleared their sprint queue and are capable of taking on this work, but being aware of team members’ workloads at every stage is critical. 

    Do Daily Stand-Ups and Raise Flags as Early as Possible

    This will help anyone encountering roadblocks so a small issue doesn’t turn into a huge bottleneck. If you look closely at your PR cycle time, you will find a ton of insights about where roadblocks often happen. Using historical data during sprints can also go a long way toward helping identify potential bottlenecks, allowing you to proactively avoid friction by delegating reviews or setting out additional time for approvals. 

    Get Ahead of Burnout

    The tech industry has a turnover rate of 13.2%—pretty high when compared to other sectors. But the reality is that it can be really difficult to identify burnout without hard data. Don’t wait until people start speaking out about being overworked: Burnout prevention should be a full-time focus. Before sprints, make sure people aren’t coming in with high levels of fatigue and make sure that overtime doesn’t routinely increase throughout.

    Use Sprint Progress Estimations to Reprioritize

    Each sprint starts off with a set workload, but in reality, every sprint is dynamic. Take a look at each day’s progress and evaluate if your team is ahead of or behind schedule. If you are on track to finish a majority of the work, you can anticipate a successful sprint end. If not, don’t worry; you can always recommend that your team recalculate priorities. Engineering managers can take this time to load-balance some of the heavier work and shift goals to the next sprint as needed. Staying flexible while maintaining a clear view of what is actually happening during the sprint, will inevitably result in success. 

    At the End of the Sprint

    Do a Thorough Sprint Retrospective 

    As a team leader, you should constantly be thinking about how things are going and how people are feeling. If you can, use hard data to look at things like time allocation, PR throughput and any items added mid-sprint. Taking notes throughout the sprint will help remind you of any issues that came up, and you can discuss ways to improve for next time. Each sprint is a chance to learn; the more you learn, the better the sprint and the better the product will be for end users. 

  • IBM ‘is Ageist and Sexist’ | IBM Mainframe-aaS | IBM Vaccine Mandate

    IBM ‘is Ageist and Sexist’ | IBM Mainframe-aaS | IBM Vaccine Mandate

    Think! Welcome to Big Blue Week here at The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: IBM’s employment practices scrutinized, IBM z/OSaaS breaks cover, and IBM encourages staff back to the office.

    1. ‘Dinobabies’ and ‘Dated Maternal’ Workforce Woes

    First up this week: IBM’s defense in an employment age discrimination lawsuit looks to be shredded. Internal emails “appear to show high-level discussion about paring the ranks of older employees.”

    Analysis: Not a good look

    According to one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, unnamed “top IBM executives were explicitly plotting with one another to oust older workers … to make room for millennial employees.” On the face of it, they seemed to be doing the polar opposite of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

    Noam Scheiber: Making ‘Dinobabies’ Extinct: IBM’s Push for a Younger Work Force

    Top IBM executives were directly involved in discussions about the need to reduce the portion of older employees … sometimes disparaging them with terms of art like “dinobabies.” … Documents made public by a Federal District Court … show executives discussing plans to phase out older employees.
    …
    The newly unsealed documents, which quote from internal company emails … show top IBM executives specifically emphasizing the need to thin the ranks of older workers and hire more younger ones. [One] email refers to IBM’s “dated maternal workforce,” an apparent allusion to older women, and says: “This is what must change. They really don’t understand social or engagement.”
    …
    Adam Pratt, an IBM spokesman, [claimed,] “IBM never engaged in systemic age discrimination.” [He] said that some of the language in the emails “is not consistent with the respect IBM has for its employees” and “does not reflect company practices or policies.”


    Yikes, ageism and sexism? Experienced staff are valuable, says MrBanana:

    I did some time at IBM [and] remember being invited to a meeting with a new group, headed by a new “thinker,” who had something to present to myself and a colleague. We walked past the foosball table to the meeting room. Naturally the room had no chairs, and was covered in multi-coloured Post-it Notes. Once they had gone through their mood boards and the non-linear presentation of this new idea, I turned to the other old geezer in the room. “Didn’t we look at something like this 8 years ago?”

    “Yeah, we worked out that compute power just to run the UI for one session wouldn’t be available for a couple of decades.” The children were somewhat disappointed, and (fortunately) we were never asked back to their romper room.


    But experience can be both a blessing and a curse, learned aahortwwy:

    I experienced both sides of this in five years at a company in hypergrowth. … I learned so much at that job: … In year 1, I was determined to accomplish X and ignored the skeptical comments of some colleagues who’d been at the company longer than me. I failed and wasted some time. In years 4 and 5, new colleagues were determined to accomplish X and ignored my skeptical comments.

    2. IBM Wazi as-a-Service Confusion

    “Mainframe” is not a dirty word. It’s secure, vertically scalable, and it put the VM in VMware. Now, what IBM Wazi did for on-prem LPARs, Wazi aaS promises to extend to hosting z/OS instances.

    Analysis: Mainframe-as-a-service reinvented

    Mainframes and cloud-native DevOps need not be incompatible. To modernize legacy apps using hybrid cloud instances for dev/test—and even prod—can be a big productivity boost. But isn’t it weird that IBM spun out its mainframe-as-a-service zCloud offering only a few months ago?

    Mike Vizard: IBM Shifts Mainframe App Testing to the Cloud

    While many workloads over the years have been migrated off mainframes or simply retired, the applications that run on z/OS today are still among the most mission-critical that organizations run. … IBM this week revealed it has added the ability to set up testing environments on the IBM Cloud for z/OS mainframe applications.
    …
    IBM plans to make IBM Wazi as-a-Service (Wazi aaS) for z/OS generally available in the second half of this year, [which] will enable DevOps teams to self-provision an instance of a z/OS virtual server on a secure private space running on IBM Cloud. … At the same time, it will become easier to modernize mainframe applications by making them more accessible to other applications via a set of secure APIs … using a cloud-native set of DevOps tools that run in a Kubernetes environment.
    …
    Modernizing mainframe applications is a less complicated endeavor than migrating them. The challenge is that building, deploying, maintaining and securing all the APIs required to do so represents a significant amount of effort.


    OK, boomer, why are we talking about 1960s mainframes on DevOps.com? Here’s ArchieBunker:

    Mainframes are different beasts altogether, almost alien when you compare them to PC hardware. You have binaries written for the S/360 system in the 1960s? Good news you can still run them natively without a recompile.

    You think virtualization and containers are a hot topic? IBM was running multiple OS instances inside a VM in the 1970s. … The engineering is incredible.


    But z/OSaaS? It’s déjà vu time for Beleagured Greybeard:

    “Cloud Managed Services for z” AKA “zCloud” has been around for over 10 years. … IBM offloaded it with the Kyndryl spin, so its odd that they now want to re-invent it.
    …
    If it’s a strategic platform, why didn’t they hold onto it instead of spinning it off to Kyndryl? Sounds like yet more daft leadership decisions.

    3. IBM’s Return to Work Plan has Vaccine Mandate

    IBM wants to “keep employees safe” as they return to office work after being fully remote. In practice, this means a vaccine mandate.

    Analysis: IBM Digital Health Pass is divisive to vocal minority

    Although there are exemptions on medical or religious grounds, IBM has promised to place dissenters on unpaid leave. As you might expect, the policy has a few employees up in arms.

    Cassie Werber: How Salesforce, IBM, and HSBC are approaching return to work

    When the pandemic hit, and IBM moved 95% of its workforce to fully remote, it was pleasantly surprised to discover no drop in productivity. … Still, they planned to return to offices.
    …
    The company saw this as a way to keep employees safe. … One example … is its development of the IBM Digital Health Pass as an alternative to vaccine cards or paper vaccine certificates, which they use to make sure all the staff that come into their offices are vaccinated.
    …
    Arvind Krishna, IBM’s CEO, meanwhile came up with what he called the IBM Work From Home Pledge. [It] included commitments to flexibility, kindness, sensitivity to family, setting boundaries, and acknowledged video fatigue. It concluded with a commitment to “be connected.”


    Tricky to “be connected” if you’re not allowed back in the building. Anne D’Innocenzio, Heather Hollingsworth, Tali Arbel, Mae Anderson, Ken Sweet, Matt O’Brien and Dee-Ann Durbin:

    IBM software engineer Justin Albano said his company recently notified employees that it would be revoking badge access to workers who aren’t vaccinated or haven’t proved that they are. “We’re not able to enter an IBM office at this time,” said Albano.
    …
    He said some workers have successfully sought religious exemptions but “my thought process was I shouldn’t have to explain to my company my faith” to get out of a policy that’s “immoral in its foundation.”


    What’s the alternative? With a perspective, it’s Chris Haney:

    Or, get the vaccine. Protect yourself and the people around you. You people really are detached from reality.

    The Moral of the Story: Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know.


    You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.

    Image: Marcin Wichary—cc:by; leveled and cropped (ask your parents)

  • Analyzing SRE Job Postings

    Analyzing SRE Job Postings

    You can find plenty of high-level definitions out on the internet about what site reliability engineering means and what site reliability engineers do.

    But if you want to understand what it’s actually like to work as a site reliability engineer, there is perhaps no better source than job descriptions. SRE job ads explain what real companies are looking for and what they expect on a day-to-day basis.

    To provide insight on what SRE looks like in practice, we’ll look at some job ads from several leading companies. As we’ll see, each company has a slightly different take on what the site reliability engineer role entails, but it’s possible to identify some core themes that underline what businesses expect.

    To understand the content of SRE job descriptions, let’s examine examples from four leading companies.

    GitLab’s Job Ad

    GitLab’s SRE job description contains most of what you would expect from a typical site reliability engineer job ad. It highlights the importance of having a mix of technical skills and collaboration skills. It also emphasizes expertise in areas like Unix/Linux, infrastructure-as-code and Kubernetes.

    What may be slightly surprising, however, is the emphasis that GitLab’s job description places on programming skills. GitLab expects SREs to know how to code in specific languages, like Ruby and Go. The takeaway is that SREs need to know more than just how to use code to solve IT operations problems. They must also be able to develop applications or contribute code to application platforms (the job description mentions “contributing to code in GitLab” as a required SRE technical skill).

    Also interesting is the fact that GitLab expects site reliability engineers to be able to write blog posts. Blogging may not be one of the first skills that come to mind when you think of a site reliability engineer’s responsibilities, but at GitLab, at least, it’s part of the job.

    LinkedIn’s Job Ad Template

    LinkedIn provides an SRE job ad template that businesses can use when posting their own SRE jobs on the site.

    LinkedIn’s ad is pretty high-level (which is unsurprising, given that it’s a template rather than an ad for a particular job). For the most part, it doesn’t mention specific tools—although the main exception is programming languages, where it says SREs should know how to code in languages like C, Python, JavaScript and Ruby. Like GitLab, then, LinkedIn clearly sees development as a core SRE job responsibility.

    The LinkedIn job description also places a heavy emphasis on the ability to “gather and analyze metrics.” It doesn’t use the word “observability,” but that seems to be what LinkedIn is getting at.

    An SRE Job at Microsoft

    Continuing the theme of development-centric SRE work, a recent job ad for a specific SRE opening at Microsoft reads a lot like a DevOps engineer job description. The ability to “design, write and deliver software” is the top responsibility listed in the ad, which also mentions familiarity with CI/CD tools.

    The Microsoft job description also mentions the importance of written and verbal communication skills. Unlike GitLab’s ad, this one doesn’t say SREs will need to write blog posts; still, it’s clear that companies expect people in this role to be creative communicators in addition to technical experts.

    It’s worth noting, too, that Microsoft wants site reliability engineers who know both Windows and Unix. If you need further proof that Unix skills are absolutely central to SRE work, look no further than this job ad from the company that created Windows.

    Amazon’s Site Reliability Engineer Ad

    Even Amazon—a company that is more of a platform provider than a software vendor—places major emphasis on the ability of SREs to code in one of its recent SRE job ads.

    Interestingly, the Amazon job also highlights networking skills as a major qualification. That’s understandable given the complexity of networking in the AWS cloud. But it’s a bit surprising because most other site reliability engineer job ads don’t call out networking expertise as a key skill—despite the fact that network engineering is critical to SRE work.

    The Amazon job description mentions the importance of an applicant’s willingness to be on-call, too. We suspect that’s critical in virtually any SRE job, but at least Amazon is upfront about the fact that, at time, you’ll be woken up at 4 a.m. to manage incidents.

    Conclusion: Takeaways

    There are a few key takeaways from these various SRE job descriptions.

    • Development skills are absolutely critical in order to be an SRE. Scripting for administration or IT Ops purposes is not enough on its own.
    • The ability to communicate clearly—including both verbally and in writing—is more important to SRE work than you may realize.
    • Network engineering skills, too, are a crucial part of SRE jobs, at least at some companies.
    • In practice, SRE job descriptions sound more similar to DevOps job ads than you might expect.

    This is not to say that all SRE roles are identical or that all companies expect the same things from their SREs, of course. But the jobs ads or templates we’ve surveyed do highlight how the high-level understanding of SRE translates to on-the-ground reality at actual companies.