Reports on the local DevOps scene from cities around the world
As we close out 2022, we at devopsy.kinsta.cloud wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2022.
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: JavaScript is a bloated barrier to progress, and Microsoft’s emoji are on GitHub. (more…)
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: Amazon S3 is keeping Ukraine’s data safe, we ask if Windows Presentation Foundation is dead, and developers tell us why they switch jobs. (more…)
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: EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework reemerges, Berkeley brings cloud selection box, and proof that remote work is good work. (more…)
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. (more…)
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: Herbert Diess is out at VW because software is hard (yo), fiber optic cable is hard to find, and the guy who said LaMDA was sentient is dumped by Google. (more…)
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: CSS-Tricks gets bought by DigitalOcean, Peloton pedals while its business burns, and Arm lays off up to 15% of staff. (more…)
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: iMessage lock-in lessons, attrition-rate fixes, and more on Mozilla.
First up this week: The weekend story getting the technorati chattering was about how Apple iMessage denizens pour scorn on Android users—identifying them by their “icky” green chat bubbles. An iPhone user’s message gets a “proper” blue background, y’see.
Amusing though the story was, the writer seemed to be hell-bent on proving some sort of Apple C-suite-led “conspiracy to lock in.” The reality is far more mundane—but it teaches important lessons for DevOps.
Could your DevOps team make a trivial engineering decision that pays unexpected dividends? While lock-in might be distasteful, seemingly irrelevant design or technical choices can have huge ramifications with users.
Tim Higgins: Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning
[The] pressure to be a part of the blue text group is the product of decisions by Apple executives starting years ago that have … helped to cement the iPhone’s dominance among young smartphone users. [It] encourages people to pay the premium … and remain loyal to its brand.
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Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable. … Jeremy Cangiano, who just finished up his MBA, … tried to cash in on it last year by selling his own merchandise that touted, “Never Date a Green Texter.”
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The blue iMessage bubble was born out of a simple engineering need, according to Justin Santamaria, a former Apple engineer who worked on the original feature. … The idea that it would keep users locked in to using Apple devices wasn’t even part of the conversation at the time, he said.
And then the other shoe dropped—via Ron Amadeo:
Google took to Twitter this weekend to complain that iMessage is just too darn influential with today’s kids. … The company is hoping this public-shaming campaign will get Apple to change its mind. [But it] probably has the least credibility of any tech company [because it] has released 13 half-hearted messaging products since iMessage launched in 2011.
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Google … seems to have learned nothing from its years of messaging failure. Today … the situation is an incredible mess, and no single Google product is as good as Hangouts was in 2015.
Ouch. With a sociological perspective, here’s Christina “filmgirlcw” Warren:
iMessage is incredibly popular with certain demographics. … It’s an in-group signifier—the way teens have always had in-group signifiers (when I was in high school, it was AIM, a Nokia, and wearing Abercrombie). … It’s always fascinating for me to go to other countries and see a ton of iPhone users not using iMessage but something else because that app has become the in-group signifier. … Every teen I know uses Discord more than they use almost anything else.
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It isn’t about lock-in or regulation or technology. It’s about fashion.
A study published this week says DevOps orgs and other internet companies rank third for attrition in the 38 industries surveyed. And if you lump that category together with “enterprise software,” it would be in clear first place.
But some companies get this right—how can you be one of them? Culture, innovation, recognition and remote work. It’s definitely not only about pay.
Donald Sull, Charles Sull and Ben Zweig report their fascinating study: Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation
Between April and September 2021, more than 24 million American employees left their jobs. [But] while resignation rates are high on average, they are not uniform … from less than 2% to more than 30%. … More-innovative companies … are experiencing higher attrition rates than their more staid competitors.
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Pay has only a moderate impact on employee turnover. … A toxic corporate culture is by far the strongest predictor of … attrition and is 10 times more important than compensation. … Job insecurity and reorganizations are important predictors of how employees rate a company’s overall culture. … But it is surprising that … the more positively employees talked about innovation at their company, the more likely they were to quit. … Employees are more likely to leave companies that fail to distinguish between high performers and laggards [or] that tolerate underperformance.
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Our analysis identified … actions that managers can take … to reduce attrition. … Lateral career opportunities are 12 times more predictive of employee retention than promotions [and] 2.5 times more powerful [than] compensation. … Company-organized social events, including happy hours, team-building excursions [and] potluck dinners … are a key element of a healthy corporate culture. … Unsurprisingly, when employees discussed remote work options in more positive terms, they were less likely to quit.
And the flipside of resignation? Hiring replacements. Let’s turn to the equilibrium of Nash Reilly:
It’s only gotten harder in recent months [and] I think I know why. … You need to offer engineers some combination of these three things to pique their interest: Cool stuff to work on, smart people to work with [and] some degree of repeatability.
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You can’t really prove to an engineer that you can give them things like good management, minimal churn, and decision making authority [so] let them talk to your employees. … Also, figure out a way to let your team “backchannel” to the candidate. [If] your product is not that cool … play up the things you can offer them: smart coworkers, and a stable working environment. … You can afford to be honest about what it is that you do offer to a candidate, [so] pitch them the truth: that you want to do good work, sustainably, for as long as you can—ideally with them on your team.
Perhaps the smart money is already skating to where the puck will be? Here’s echelon:
Engineering salaries are … one of the biggest expenses. … Companies love that they can now hire remotely and pay adjusted cost of living. They’ll hire as many workers in middle America as they can, and once enough of the workforce is concentrated outside of expensive cities, you’ll see them stop hiring in SF and NY entirely. [And] startup capital is already beginning to shift to … emerging markets. Employment will eventually head there too.
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Make your money now while the iron is still hot.
After accusing Mozilla of jumping the shark last week, perhaps I owe the Firefox folks a positive inclusion this time? The release notes for Firefox 96 certainly sound good.
Outside the Apple walled garden, Firefox is about the only non-Chromium browser. A browser monoculture can’t be a good thing for anyone—not DevOps nor users.
Michael Gariffo: Firefox 96 update focuses on noise improvements, main thread efficiency
On the desktop side of things, Mozilla’s latest release made “significant improvements” to the browser’s built-in [sound] noise suppression and auto-gain-control features. These improvements are aimed at web-based video chat users.
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The second tentpole feature in version 96 focuses on reducing main-thread load, which should help the browser function better on older, slower, or congested systems. [And] a new enforcement setting for cookies … will, by default, apply the “Same-Site=lax” policy. Mozilla claims this will help better defend users against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks.
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Mozilla also acknowledged that it is working on correcting the performance of detached videos being played in full screen on macOS devices. … No timeframe was mentioned for when it might be available again.
Okay. Sounds good. But not to Tetch:
Never mind all that fancy stuff. … Any reduction in crashes?
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FF crashes for me several times a month. … I always take the trouble to fill in the “What were you doing immediately before the crash?” section of the crash submission dialog, and never hear another thing.
But more efficiency on the main thread? Tell me more. ksec:
Such an important detail that deserves at least few more sentences of marketing message or explanation. But the whole release note just feels like they couldn’t be bothered anymore.
You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.
Image: Moritz Knöringer (via Unsplash)
DAOPS Foundation recently hosted its “Global DevOps Development Forum” in Santa Clara, California. The meetup, which was held May 13, was hosted by Jeff Liu, a DevOps expert from Google, and drew DevOps experts from Tencent, JFrog and JD.
The topics of this meeting were the history of DevOps and the introduction of DevOps capability maturity model. Liu shared the theme of DevOps’ development and current situation: Before the advent of DevOps, the lack of communication between development and operations teams always made it difficult to solve problems when they happened.
Since 2007, a movement to combine development and IT operations has occurred in Europe, and people are increasingly aware of the importance of combining the two. With the development of the movement, the scope of this concept is also expanding. It is no longer simply the communication between developers and IT operations personnel, but has been extended to the entire development life cycle, from the beginning of the process to the automation through deploying solutions in incremental build systems. The term “continuous delivery” is now used, especially for dynamic applications deployed on the internet. DevOps capability has become the focus of many enterprises’ transformation; we need to continue to move forward in the repeated failures and find out the suitable transformation path for ourselves.
During the meeting, Liu invited experts from JFrog shared their understanding of DevOps and expectations for the future.
The meeting was also the opening ceremony of DAOPS Foundation. Liu and Kohsuke Kawaguchi attended the meeting as governing board members. Alan Shimel, editor in chief of devopsy.kinsta.cloud and another board member, was unable to reach the scene for personal reasons, but sent a welcome via video recording. As partners in future course development of DAOPS Foundation, Jayne Groll, CEO of DevOps Institute, also sent her founding wishes.
As an international organization, DAOPS Foundation hopes to gather experts from home and abroad to work together to improve the IT engineering efficiency (R&D efficiency) of enterprises in different industries around the world and to assist enterprise transformation. This is also called Advanced Software Engineering Model (ASEM), which based on DevOps framework. DAOPS Foundation introduces ASEM.
Future tasks of DAOPS Foundation:
DAOPS Foundation conference attendance:
DAOPS welcomes your participation as co-founders or individuals. If you are passionate about DevOps or AIOps and are enthusiastic about the future development of DevOps and AIOps, we sincerely invite you to join our team to contribute to the future development of DevOps and AIOps.
Any questions, please contact DAOPS Foundation via email or look for us on Twitter.
DevOps has taken root in Australia, where its practitioners are showing a high level of sophistication.
According to Paul Muller, vice president of Strategic Marketing, Software, at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Asia Pacific and Japan, interest in DevOps at Australian organizations rose, fell back and then rose again—a pattern that reminds us of Gartner’s Hype Cycle.
DevOps has progressed from the stage where its devotees were seen as a ‘radical fringe’ fighting against the organizations where they work, and is quickly becoming part of mainstream IT, he said, observing he has even heard the CEO of a bank talking about DevOps. (The banking sector in Australia is highly concentrated, with the ‘Big Four’ collectively accounting for around 80 percent of the market, with the customer-owned, regional and foreign-owned banks taking the rest.)
More generally, executives increasingly realize “their business is only as good as their software,” he said.
He sees innovation occurring in what are sometimes regarded as very traditional sectors (automotive, banking and finance, to name two) as companies realize that they face—or soon will face—competition from “software-savvy startups.”
The success of DevOps shows “Adam Smith was wrong”—that is, overspecialization is bad, he observed.
“The sophistication here is higher than I would have expected,” and higher than in most places outside Silicon Valley, said Muller.
The Australian DevOps community benefits from the huge amount of volunteer effort that goes into organizing events such as meetups. HPE is helping with its ‘DevOps Days’ that expose the company’s customers to HPE’s DevOps culture and practice, allowing them to “live a day in the life of this modern process” and take a better understanding back to their own organization.
One DevOps mistake he has seen made that generally results in failure is what he calls “processes of fetish,” where people simply try to copy another organization’s practices instead of developing a true understanding of DevOps.
He also drew attention to the shortcomings of measuring productivity in terms of lines of code or function points delivered. That overlooks, for example, the contribution of a person who does a lot of coaching.
Muller drew particular attention to the importance of scaled agile to larger organizations with multiple internal and/or external teams that need to work together to successfully complete projects. In such environments, problems arise if it is not used.
To be successful, DevOps requires the right collection of people, the right measurement and reward system, and the right tools (such as HPE ALM Octane, which can among many other things handle the synchronization of data across multiple teams), he said.
But it’s not just about implementation: organizations and teams still need to generate ideas that can be put into production. There are tools to help that process, Muller said, and HPE is teaching its innovation methodology to other organizations.
Many businesses spruik their innovation credentials and want their developers to focus on innovation. Agile and DevOps help free up developers’ minds—along with those of their colleagues in business units—to do just that, Muller said.
As is to be expected from a world capital city, London is also a hotbed of DevOps adoption. The local London DevOps community is thriving with a near constant stream of DevOps conferences. There are however two great events coming up that are can’t miss. DevOps Connect: CD Connect/Jenkins Days in May and Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit in June are both in London. Now you can attend both for the price of one!
Right now due to the devopsy.kinsta.cloud sponsorship of DOES London and the generosity of the sponsors of both events, if you sign up for the full £179 two-day ticket for DevOps Connect: CD Summit/Jenkins Days you will receive the full £179 back in the form of a credit towards your ticket for DOES London. You wind up attending CD Connect/Jenkins Days for free!
So what do you get from attending DevOps Connect: CD Summit/Jenkins Days and the DevOps Enterprise London? Glad you asked. Let me give you some of the highlights to look forward to.
First DevOps Connect: CD Summit/Jenkins Days:
Sacha Labrourey, CEO and Founder CloudBees, former CTO JBoss speaking on “Why Jenkins Has Become the Engine of Continuous Everything.”
Sanjeev Sharma, CTO & Distinguished Engineer for DevOps, IBM on “Adopting DevOps at Enterprise Scale.”
Gary Gruver, Author of “Leading the Transformation”, Previously executive IT positions at Macy’s and HP, speaking on Leading the Transformation: “Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale.”
After this great morning of keynotes, there are three tracks all full of great speakers and topics after lunch. You really don’t want to miss this event and if you were planning on going to the DevOps Enterprise Summit London, you can go to CD Summit/Jenkins Days for free.
Why go to DevOps Enterprise Summit London? Well if you want to hear about the experiences of large enterprises in adopting DevOps, there is no better place. In the previous two Summits held in San Francisco, Gene Kim and team have done a great job of shining a light on “horses” DevOps transformations. This first London edition of the franchise promises to be equally as great. It will be held at the Hilton Metropole in London.
Some of the speakers scheduled to present include:
Gene Kim, Author, Researcher and Founder of IT Revolution.
Gareth Rushgrove, Senior Software Engineer, Puppet.
Jason Cox, Director, Systems Engineering, The Walt Disney Company.
This is just the tip of the iceberg really. There will be over 25 speakers at DOES London, as well as community space, breakout sessions and more.
While London has more than its share of DevOps events, I am not sure it has experienced the likes of these two events before. Please don’t miss them and look forward to seeing you there.