Despite what you may have heard to the contrary, not everything that happens in Vegas should stay there. Take the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 (DOES18), for example: The three-day event attracted the best and brightest in the DevOps world—and me—to discuss all things DevOps. Some of those great conversations were captured in a series of video interviews, which are now available on DevOps TV.
During the two days of interviews in our glass-walled video booth, a variety of folks stopped by to chat about topics ranging from audits and compliance to NextGen Ops and the future of DevOps. Below is a recap of the Day 1 video interviews from DOES18 (Day 2’s recap will post next week):
The Future of DevOps
Wesley Pullen of Electric Cloud, Torsten Volk of EMA and Chris Nowak of FlowStates stopped by to discuss the latest DevOps trends, where DevOps is headed, and understand key emerging practices and technologies that are driving success.
Venture Capital and DevOps
Sid Sijbrandij of GitLab, CJ Napolitano of Electric Cloud and Ubaid Dhiyan of Union Square Advisors chatted about the current state of VC investment into DevOps, how this could evolve in the future and the impact this investment ecosystem has on the global economy.
ITSM/DevOps Crossover
IT Skeptic Rob England and his partner Dr. Cherry Vu discussed what holds ITIL back from more successful transformation of IT work, and how we can help it succeed, as DevOps and ITSM finally converge on each other in the common ground of service operations.
‘Dear Auditor’ — Compliance and DevOps
Sam Guckenheimer of Microsoft, James Wickett of Signal Sciences and Topo Pal of Capital One talked about the current state of DevOps and audit/compliance. They are part of a team that wrote a love letter to auditors from DevOps, in which a promise was made to make life better. They also compiled a list of audit concerns and documented them in a DevOps Risk Control Matrix with lot of details around the controls, practices and evidences that are collected to support the control.
NextGen Ops
Damon Edwards of Rundeck, Cornelia Davis of Pivotal Software and Tom Limoncelli of Stack Overflow chatted about the next generation of IT Ops and what emerging patterns and practices teams should consider for the future of IT.
Workplace Burnout
John Willis (Botchagalupe) is passionate about so many topics around DevOps, cloud and technology. One of the areas he is really passionate about, though, is the topic of burnout and fatigue in the IT field. He and Dr. Christina Maslach discussed the concept of burnout and examined the causes and effects of this problem, and the most promising strategies for dealing effectively with it.
Project to Product
Dr. Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop, reviewed the transition from project-based work to product-based workflows—the most optimized and scalable DevOps environment will be a highly prized gem for any business only if the product management team is prioritizing the right capabilities into the DevOps process.
Tech for Tech Leaders
Anders Wallgren of Electric Cloud and Erica Morrison of CSG discussed the technology landscape and what things tech leaders need to not only understand from a tech and architecture perspective, but also what they need to know to help build technology and tech platforms for the future of software delivery.
Banking on DevOps
Mark Howell of Lloyds Banking Group, Shaun Norris of Standard Chartered Bank and John Rzeszotarski of KeyBank reviewed a few of the top DevOps journeys in banking and what other financial institutions should consider along their DevOps journeys.
Well, there ya have it: An entire day’s worth of videos compiled for your viewing pleasure. Be sure to check back next week for a recap of our Day 2 video interviews from DOES18 Las Vegas.
“What happens in Vegas, doesn”t stay in Vegas” … a great quote to end the recent DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 (DOES18) in Las Vegas, urging attendees to take and share the new insights and knowledge gained. This article is an attempt at sharing my discoveries.
This article contains a summary of the challenges that delegates told me about when visiting the GamingWorks stand at the summit. These closely match our global findings, with more than 400 teams having participated in the Phoenix Project business simulation workshop.
This article also describes highlights from the sessions I had time to attend—highlights mostly in relation to the challenges mentioned above, and biased toward toward people, culture and behavior, as this to me is the No. 1 success or fail factor for the successful adoption of DevOps ways of working.
Challenges
I asked more than 100 people, “What is your top challenge or barrier for your adoption of DevOps ways of working?” I have ordered them based upon the number of times mentioned, highest first. Many of these I captured before the opening of the summit:
Leadership:
Leaders applying the “pointy-fingered” approach. “You are now self-empowered. Make IT happen.‘
Lack of “empowerment” and not “walking-the-talk” to foster the right culture.
Not wanting to let go of a “command and control” management approach and fear of becoming less relevant.
Product Management:
The need to shift from a “feature” focus to more “outcome” and “business value” focus.
Product owners “demand” but don”t share why.
Low focus on “technical debt” and “issues” versus “benefits.”
Need higher-level product management (business decision makers) to balance “innovation” with “risks” (e.g technical debt).
Value Stream:
Poor end-to-end visibility (including business “before” and “after” activities).
A narrow focus on Dev and Ops, mostly a Dev “pipeline.”
No impediment backlog visible for the stream.
Too much local optimization.
Value and Metrics:
Too much focus on internal, proxy metrics.
Need more “value” and “outcome” metrics to gain buy-in to scale up.
End-to-End Communication and Team Collaboration:
“Them” and “Us” – lack of trust.
Poor listening and communication skills to explore and understand.
Lack of end-to-end understanding of the business impact and value we are all working toward.
Poor Management of WIP:
Poor balance between types of work, feature vs technical debt, improvements, training and knowledge-sharing.
Engineer disconnect between “what you are working on and the business impact.”
Continual Learning and Improvement:
Not enough WIP reserved.
Poor team ownership and ability to structure this.
No visible backlog of impediments/improvement.
No prioritization of improvements.
Project to Product:
Projects claiming resources.
Product owner resource conflicts and challenges.
Flip-flopping, context switching work.
Buy-in and Resistance:
Why should we change?
Fear, uncertainty, doubt.
Suspicion of intentions.
Managers not wanting to change and lose “power.”
Certainly not a lot of CI/CD or technology stuff mentioned here!
What were some of my highlights as they relate to these challenges?
DOES18: Introduction and Opening
In his introduction, Gene Kim revealed one of the goals of the summit was a need to “Elevate focus on spanning business/technology divide,” which clearly relates to a high-scoring challenge. Another topic in the intro was the need to “upskill,” announcing a new skills research project to be launched. The challenges above and the highlights from the sessions give a clear indication of some of the skills needed. Considering the challenges above, I sincerely hope the survey also focuses on business skills as well. In the “Lean Coffee” roundtable sessions, one of the announced topics was “Transformational Leadership,” clearly linking to the top scoring challenges mentioned. More about this topic in my closing.
DOES18 Sessions
In a session titled, “Product Management Meets DevOps” a key recommendation was to “build and run teams combined with service ownership,” stressing a need “to connect people to your strategy” and declaring “IT cannot be separate from the business,” and finishing with a need to “manage product value streams, not projects.” (This was the only session in which I heard the word “service”). To me, these highlights clearly make a link back to the challenge teams have in understanding business impact and value. These recommendations will require a changing role for product management to ensure strategic priorities are embedded in the value stream, and a more engaged role of product owners in teams to ensure a shared understanding and focus on “outcomes” and “value” in relation to strategy, rather than on features.
Benefit: Enabling the flow of strategic intent
Mark Schwartz explained that almost all large enterprises are faced with “impediments” that are a barrier to DevOps success, and these are usually people and organizational issues, not technology. He introduced his new “War and Peace and IT” book, and explained an impediment faced by Napoleon in his Russian campaign—Napoleon had “long decision cycles.” By the time he got the right information to make a strategic decision, the fast-changing short decision cycles at the battlefield meant his decision-making was ineffective. The same applies to the way we currently manage IT: long decision-making cycles from idea to business case to program and project resourcing while DevOps teams operate at a fast, agile pace. Mark suggested a need to speed up the “entire lead time from idea to impact” (a topic also explored in Mark Smalley’s latest DASA whitepaper, “The Business Value of DevOps“).
Benefit: Enabling the faster flow of strategic intent
Schwartz went on to suggest three ways to build more agility into the end-to-end value stream and delegate decision-making to a lower level: the “product model,” decentralizing decision to the product team; the “budget model,” decentralizing budget to the team to manage both “innovation” and “keeping the lights on”; and the “objective model,” just give the team the key objectives to be achieved and let them decide how to make it happen anyway they can.
This to me represents a considerable mindset shift from the hierarchical “command and control” management paradigm and requires transformational leadership. In my mind, whatever model is chosen needs to fit with the highlight from the previous session, “Connect people to your strategy.”
Benefit: Enabling faster decision-making around strategic intent
Anders Wallgren‘s session, “Measuring DevOps – The Key Metrics That Matter” was standing room only, with a packed audience taking pictures of all of the slides. I must admit to being surprised, as this is the fifth DOES conference and organizations have had five years to put metrics in place! I can only assume the vast majority were just starting their journey. I was pleased to see not just the traditional metrics often quoted such as “deployment frequency,” “lead time to change,” “mean time to recover (MTTR),” and “change failure rate,” but also business value metrics such as revenue growth; customer value metrics such as customer experience satisfaction; team culture metrics such as education and growth; and the pipeline metrics such as release velocity. This was one of the top-scoring challenges facing delegates who visited our table: “Fhifting from internal metrics to business value metrics.” This focus on business value metrics ties in again to the highlight from the first session above, “Connect people to the strategy,” and the important role product owners have in sharing the strategic intent.
Benefit: Enabling measurement of strategic intent.
Dr. Mik Kersten presented “Project to Product: How Value Steam Networks will transform IT and the Business,” suggesting that project management and traditional cost models are the wrong models, an idea supporting Mark Schwartz’s observations. He went on to add, “Fragmented value streams kill personal productivity,” as well as “impact employee satisfaction.” Silos and proxy metrics not related to business value will also destroy a DevOps transformation. He made some powerful arguments for a complete end-to-end value stream (Not just a DevOps value stream).
These messages were further endorsed by Carmen De Ardo in his session, “Connecting IT to the Business at BMW Group,” during which he also stressed, “Flow time is not just code-to-commit but also, and more importantly, idea-to-value.” Carmen also stressed that the “flow to value” is not just the flow of “features” but also “defects,” “risks” and “debts,” which to me represents a need to manage “value optimization,” a balance of “value creation” and a reduction of “value leakage.”
Benefit: Enabling value optimization of strategic intent.
Damon Edwards, in his session “Operations: The Last Mile,” expanded on the theme of end-to-end value streams, with a powerful case about disruption, context switching, waiting, escalations, lack of trust and employee dissatisfaction—all this because of “four forces that undermine operations” that need to be addressed to empower operations:
Reduction of Toil—non-valued repetitive work that can be automated.
Queues, which disintegrate and obfuscate value streams.
Silos, causing disconnects and mismatches.
Low trust—the need for “psychological safety, the No. 1 predicate for success.”
Benefit: Enabling the removal of behavioral flow barriers and waste.
Dominca Degrandis in her session, “Making Connections Visible: How to Defrag Your ValueStream,” stressed, “The hardest thing we do is communicate across teams,” making a call to make connections visible as well as “how the different types of work enters the system, where they enter and which tools are used.” This touched on a topic I discussed with DeArdo at itSMF Fusion: the information value stream.
Benefit: Enabling the removal of end-to-end information and behavioral flow barriers and waste.
One of the most powerful sessions for me was the presentation from Dr. Steve Spear: “Discovering Your Way to Greatness: How Finding and Fixing Faults is the Path to Perfection.” He suggested, “Design all work to SEE problems.” Make this part of a philosophy: “See, Solve, Spread (Share knowledge).” He suggested, don’t ask “How is it going?” Ask, “What is not working, and what can we do about it?” This ties in nicely with a finding from the latest State Of DevOps report: “Relentless improvement work leads to excellence and high performance.”
Benefit: Enabling the relentless removal of barriers and waste and the optimization of strategic intent.
DOES18: A Customer Case
Mascha Boender and Stefan Groot presented an ABN AMRO case, “Crossing the DevOps Chasm: From Taboo to Enterprise DevOps,” in which they discussed their bottom-up journey of experimentation. They designed their approaches to see problems. They admitted failure, demonstrating their learning and how they made iterative improvements. They stepped away from a maturity model to a capability model, recognizing that one size doesn’t fit all teams. They provided a “Moonshot workshop,” focusing on specific team goals and ambitions and how these aligned to business strategic goals. They provided a DevOps playbook (based on captured team best practices) to help new teams develop practices at their own pace. To develop team “soft skills” such as communication and collaboration, they used the Phoenix Project business simulation workshop. This was done also with more than 30 leaders to create a mindset shift and demonstrate the change of leadership behaviors required to empower the teams and foster an enterprisewide culture change.
Benefit: Enabling bottom-up and top-down “skills” and “culture” and aligning team goals to strategic intent.
The State Of DevOps
Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble presented, “The Data Behind DevOps: Becoming a High Performer,” in which they shared findings from the latest “State Of DevOps” report. I won’t go into detail. I suggest you read the report, then read it again. Suffice to say their key messaging echoed many of the other sessions above: “Focus on outcomes, not output,” the need to “identify constraints and continually improve,” and for me an important topic: “Influencing culture through leadership and autonomy.”
The ABN case above was an example of how they gave teams autonomy to change and how they helped change leadership behaviors.
DOES18: Final Thoughts
As I stated at the start, culture to me is the No. 1 success or fail factor. The “State of DevOps” report stressed the importance of leadership on culture. Leadership was the top challenge mentioned by delegates visiting our stand. I”d like to share with you an article on devopsy.kinsta.cloud on how to influence leadership behaviors: The article is written through the lens of “communication,” tying back to a comment from Dominica Degrandis: “The hardest thing we do is communicate across teams,” and tying in with the ABN AMRO case about developing communication and collaboration skills.
And finally, getting back to the start of the summit and the need to “upskill,” with the announcement of a skills survey, I’d like to provide some input. Here is a DevOps Agile Skills Association (DASA) article, “DASA Provides Core Skills Key for DevOps Success,” which summarizes the “people and culture” elements from the “State of DevOps” report (this year and previous years) matching these with findings from more than 400 teams having participated in the Phoenix Project DevOps simulation. This I believe can provide input into the survey.
The DevOps Enterprise Summit turned 4 years old this year, and what a difference four years makes: At the inaugural summit, perhaps a few hundred attendees participated. This year, there were roughly 2,000, according to the organizers.
The energy at the first year’s event felt like that of a skunkworks team that knew they were on to a great new way—they only had to sell the rest of the world on their radical ideas. This year, it became clear that the battle of ideas is over: The DevOps evangelists have won, and DevOps is here to stay.
According to a DBmaestro study, more than 80 percent of organizations have adopted DevOps to some degree, but only 30 percent have done so across their entire organization. That study shows the popularity of DevOps, but also that there’s much more work to be done.
That state of work was reflected at this year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit. This year the focus was on improving the pipelines that have been built, pushing the limits of DevOps even further and learning how to cope with the limitations of legacy business-technology systems that refuse yet to be retired.
Greater Focus on Business Outcomes
It seems DevOps has arrived. As Scott Prugh, chief architect and VP software development at CSG, said during his DevOps Enterprise Summit talk, “Product Management Meets DevOps,” it’s about business leaders from across the organization coming together to deliver better outcomes.
That’s an aspect of DevOps that stood out boldly this year. DevOps practices in the enterprise are starting to move beyond the common cloud-native toolsets and are being applied to other areas in the organization, from the cloud back to mainframe and many systems in between.
This unleashing of systems detached from the typical DevOps workflows turned out to be a central theme of the summit. For instance, Eric Robertson, VP product marketing management at CollabNet, explained how customers are exposing services on their mainframes and enterprise resource planning systems. As a result, customers are better able to deliver capability and value without having to re-create and re-release services.
“It’s about knocking down the silos and optimizing functionality around business value,” said Sam Fell, VP of marketing at Electric Cloud. Those who aren’t doing it right, he said, are those who are not aligned well enough to provide the best business outcomes, the right user experience or the most optimal architecture, security and performance necessary to succeed in creating those user experiences.
“You need to take a multidimensional approach and put the right people in the room early enough so that the right focus is maintained on outcomes,” said Anders Wallgren, CTO at Electric Cloud, during the DevOps Enterprise Summit.
Both Fell and Wallgren agreed that more organizations have embraced the kind of architectures necessary to support the agility necessary to succeed. This includes container architectures that can be changed rapidly and safely so that in the event errors are introduced, systems can be remediated quickly.
Challenges Remain
In his talk, “DevOps for the Enterprise: 2018 Trends and Insights,” Wesley Pullen, chief strategy officer at Electric Cloud, detailed how enterprises are working to manage IT complexity. According to findings he shared from 451 Research, enterprises are taking a hybrid approach to cloud and container adoption, with 81 percent of organizations adopting a multi-cloud strategy, 58 percent adopting containers and 48 percent traditional on-premises systems. “What we have today are multiple teams working on independent and interdependent systems and target platforms with overlapping tools, platforms and release cadences. Managing all of this effectively is a challenge,” he said.
One area where these challenges show themselves is with security. According to the “Sonatype2018 State of Software Supply Chain” study, since the Equifax data breach in 2017, there has been a 55 percent increase in open source breaches and 1 million downloads of vulnerable open source libraries. Fortunately, more organizations are embracing DevSecOps and making sure security processes are integrated into their DevOps processes, Pullen said.
When it comes to extracting value from their existing enterprise systems, Pullen noted more organizations are making self-service catalogs available to their teams so that if a service is needed and it’s already been built, teams can access these resources quickly.
Finally, he said more organizations are applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to their development pipelines. About one-third of organizations are making machine learning a top investment priority. They are using the technology to identify patterns using in-depth statistical analysis, predict future risk using previous patterns and provide recommendations to reduce risk, he said.
While DevOps has outgrown its skunkworks roots, this year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit made it clear there is still much more work to be done before most DevOps organizations reach their full potential.
Conference agenda now available featuring business and technology leaders from AGCO, Google, Intel, Lloyds Banking Group, Target, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, Verizon and more
PORTLAND, Ore., August 28, 2018 – IT Revolution (http://itrevolution.com), the industry leader for advancing DevOps, today announced the final round of speakers to be added to the DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018 (https://events.itrevolution.com/us/) agenda. The conference takes place from October 22-24, 2018 at the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas. IT Revolution and founding partner, Electric Cloud, will offer expansive education opportunities covering all phases of IT transformation for business and technology leaders at large, complex organizations.
To receive a $300 discount on a full conference pass, register with discount code “DEVOPS300” at: (https://events.itrevolution.com/us/register/). Discount ticket pricing is extremely limited. Attendees are encouraged to register as soon as possible as the event is expected to sell out early.
Maximize your interactions with fellow attendees by staying at the conference hotel, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. Specially priced rooms are available via link below. Room block is limited, so make your reservation early: (https://bit.ly/2BbjlKs).
The final group of speakers for DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018 includes:
Nicole Bryan, Vice President Product Development, Tasktop
Brent Chapman, Principal, Great Circle Associates
Ross Clanton, Executive Director – Technology Modernization, Verizon
Dan Cuniff, Principal Engineer, Target
Gabrielle Davelaar, Data Platform Solution Architect/A.I., Microsoft
Chris Doucet, Solutions Engineer, Electric Cloud
Jeffrey Dowds, Chief Technology Officer in Information Technology and Security, Vanguard
Jordan Edwards, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft
John Esser, Sr. Director Datacenter Operations and SaaS, AdvanceMD
Kevin Fisher, Associate Vice President of Program and Application Services, Nationwide
Levi Geinert, Director of Engineering, Target
Mark Howell, DevOps Lead, Lloyds Banking Group
Jian Ma, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Google
Erik Maziarz, IT System Administrator II, AGCO
Gary McKay, Scrum Master and Release and Deployment Manager, Somos
Ken Moser, Special Assistant to the Applied Technology Division, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services
Shozab Naqvi, Solution Architect, Electric Cloud
Chris Nowak, Founder, FlowStates
Wesley Pullen, Chief DevOps Strategist, Electric Cloud
Melinda Solomon, Agile Training Lead, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services
J. Paul Reed, Managing Partner, Release Engineering Approaches
Andrew Shafer, Senior Director of Technology, Pivotal
Jan Schilt, CEO, GamingWorks
Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director, Hybrid Cloud, Software Defined, Infrastructure and Machine Learning, EMA Research
Anders Wallgren, CTO, Electric Cloud
Paula Watson, Director DevSecOps, DXC Technologies
“I’m so delighted at the breadth of industries represented by the speakers for our Las Vegas conference,” said Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook and Accelerate. “Attendees will discover emerging DevOps practices, connect with industry pioneers and will sure leave energized to apply what they’ve learned in their own organization.”
Get a sneak peak of the DevOps Enterprise Summit from speakers. A special edition of Electric Cloud’s Continuous Discussions (#c9d9) video podcast will take place on Tuesday, Sept 18 at 10 a.m. PDT. Learn more at: (http://electric-cloud.com/c9d9-devops-podcast/)
About the DevOps Enterprise Summit The DevOps Enterprise Summit is a conference for technology and business leaders who are transforming how large, complex organizations deliver and operate software to help their organizations win in the marketplace.
Entering its fifth year in the USA, its goal is to accelerate DevOps adoption and increase the likelihood of those initiatives succeeding, enabling the cultural norms, technical practices and architectures that help organizations achieve the highest levels of performance.
The event features experience reports and subject matter expert talks from technology and business leaders at top global brands that leverage DevOps to thrive within today’s software-driven economy. Through keynotes, breakout sessions, collaborative workshops and space to interact within an expo hall, attendees gain insights into the evolving technical and architectural practices and the methods needed to lead widespread change efforts in large organizations.
Organizers reveal a powerful lineup of business and technology leaders from Walmart, Microsoft, JP Morgan Chase, American Express, Lockheed Martin, Jaguar Land Rover, Delta Airlines and more
PORTLAND, Ore., Aug.15, 2018 – IT Revolution (http://itrevolution.com), the industry leader for advancing DevOps, today announced the third round of speakers for the DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018 (https://events.itrevolution.com/us/). The conference takes place from October 22-24, 2018 at the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas. IT Revolution and founding partner, Electric Cloud, will host an immersive learning program for identifying and amplifying top DevOps transformation practices with business and technology leaders from large, complex organizations.
To receive a $300 discount on the full ticket price, register with discount code “DEVOPS300” at: (https://events.itrevolution.com/us/register/). Discount ticket pricing is limited to the first 200 registrants. Attendees are encouraged to register as soon as possible as the event is expected to sell out early.
The third round of speakers for DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018 includes:
Chad Avery, DevOps Program Manager, American Express
Dan Barker, Chief Architect, National Association of Insurance Commissioners
Aimee Bechtle, Senior Manager Advanced Engineering, Capital One
Jill Campbell, Principal Group Program Manager, Windows Engineering, Microsoft
Aimee Cardwell, VP Consumer Product Development, American Express
Christophe De Boeck, Technical Delivery Manager Core and Lending, Kiwibank
Dominica DeGrandis, Director, Digital Transformation, Tasktop
Rob England, Managing Director, Teal Unicorn
Laura Fay, VP Research, XaaS Product Management, TSIA
Bryan Finster, Staff Software Engineer, Walmart
Dana Finster, Sr. Software Engineer, Walmart
Jim Grafmeyer, Director, IT Architecture, Nationwide
Abbie Gray, Product Manager in Credit Card Channels Product & Platform, Capital One
Sam Guckenheimer, Product Owner, Microsoft
Chris Hill, Head of Systems Engineering, Infotainment, Jaguar Land Rover
Shannon Leitz, DevSecOps Leader, Intuit
Dr. Christina Maslach, Professor of Psychology, Emerita, University of California, Berkeley
Dr. Steve Mayner, SAFe Fellow and Principal Consultant, Scaled Agile
Kenneth McLeish, Global Head of Equity Technology, JP Morgan Chase Asset Management
Danny Myers, Head of Equities Production Management, JP Morgan Chase Asset Management
Shaun Norris, Global Head, Cloud Infrastructure Services, Standard Chartered Bank
John Rzeszotarski, SVP, Director of Continuous Delivery and Feedback, KeyBank
Dylan Smith, DevOps Architect, Microsoft
Jared Speno, Senior Technical Consultant, Nationwide
Robin Yeman, Lockheed Martin Fellow, Lockheed Martin
“The 2018 DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas program includes some of the most exciting technology transformation stories from large enterprise organizations that we’ve seen to date,” said Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook and Accelerate. “Technology leaders will get tremendous value from these sessions, as well as learning from domain experts in all the fields we draw upon to help our organizations win.”
Book your room at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas now for a special reduced rate. The room block is limited, so make your reservation early at: (https://bit.ly/2BbjlKs).
To get a preview of what’s to come at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, watch a special edition of Electric Cloud’s Continuous Discussions (#c9d9) video podcast on Tuesday, Aug. 21 at 10 a.m. PDT. Gene Kim, Cornelia Davis, Damon Edwards, Mik Kersten, and Tom Limoncelli will hold a discussion on “Next Gen Operations and Infrastructure” ahead of the event. Learn more at: (http://electric-cloud.com/c9d9-devops-podcast/).
About the DevOps Enterprise Summit The DevOps Enterprise Summit is a conference for technology and business leaders who are transforming how large, complex organizations deliver and operate software to help their organizations win in the marketplace.
Entering its fifth year in the USA, its goal is to accelerate DevOps adoption and increase the likelihood of those initiatives succeeding, enabling the cultural norms, technical practices and architectures that help organizations achieve the highest levels of performance.
The event features experience report and subject matter expert talks from technology and business leaders at top global brands that leverage DevOps to thrive within today’s software-driven economy. Through keynotes, breakout sessions, collaborative workshops and space to interact within an expo hall, attendees gain insights into the evolving technical and architectural practices and the methods needed to lead widespread change efforts in large organizations
IT Revolution assembles technology leaders and practitioners through publishing, events, and research. Our goal is to elevate the state of technology work, quantify the economic and human costs associated with suboptimal IT performance, and to improve the lives of technology professionals.
Program expands to next generation IT operations and how to span the business and tech divide, features prominent domain experts and leaders from Nike, IBM, CSG International and more
PORTLAND, Ore., July 25, 2018 – IT Revolution (http://itrevolution.com), the industry leader for advancing DevOps, today announced its next round of speakers for the DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018 (https://events.itrevolution.com/us/). IT Revolution and founding partner, Electric Cloud, are hosting the event at The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas from October 22-24, 2018. The DevOps Enterprise Summit features world-class learning opportunities, inclusive networking sessions, and a collaborative platform to exchange insights with leading business and technology leaders from around the globe.
Erica Morrison, Executive Director, Software Engineering, CSG International
Scott Prugh, SVP Software Engineering, CSG International
Joseph Wilson, Executive Director, Global Information Security, CSG International
“I’m very much looking forward to another incredible learning experience for technology leaders who are transforming their organizations at the DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas,” said Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook and Accelerate. “Our focus areas this year are joint presentations from business leaders and technology leaders who are helping their organizations win, and exploring next-generation Operations and infrastructure. Without a doubt, there’s been no better time to be in technology than now, where it can help organizations achieve its survival and thrive in the marketplace.”
Want more resources from the DevOps Enterprise Summit community? Past presentations, videos, and research papers are available below for free.
About the DevOps Enterprise Summit The DevOps Enterprise Summit is a conference for technology and business leaders who are transforming how large, complex organizations deliver and operate software to help their organizations win in the marketplace.
Entering its fifth year in the USA, its goal is to accelerate DevOps adoption and increase the likelihood of those initiatives succeeding, enabling the cultural norms, technical practices and architectures that help organizations achieve the highest levels of performance.
The event features experience report and subject matter expert talks from technology and business leaders at top global brands that leverage DevOps to thrive within today’s software-driven economy. Through keynotes, breakout sessions, collaborative workshops and space to interact within an expo hall, attendees gain insights into the evolving technical and architectural practices and the methods needed to lead widespread change efforts in large organizations.
Share This: #DevOps Enterprise Summit #LasVegas 2018 announces 2nd round of speakers! Register now & learn alongside these industry pros: @ojacques2, @damonedwards, @chaddunavant @ScottPrugh @ericamorrison @mik_kersten and more! https://events.itrevolution.com/us/register/ @DOES_USA #DOES18
About IT Revolution
IT Revolution assembles technology leaders and practitioners through publishing, events, and research. Our goal is to elevate the state of technology work, quantify the economic and human costs associated with suboptimal IT performance, and to improve the lives of IT professionals.
World-class speaker lineup features technology leaders, DevOps practitioners and subject matter experts from Hearst, The Walt Disney Company, Nike, Capital One, Microsoft and more
PORTLAND, Ore., June 14, 2018 – IT Revolution (http://itrevolution.com), the industry leader for advancing DevOps, today announced its first round of speakers for the DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018 (https://events.itrevolution.com/us/). The event will take place at a new location – The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas from October 22-24, 2018. The DevOps Enterprise Summit offers a collaborative and inclusive atmosphere for business and technology leaders facilitating transformational journeys for the largest and most complex organizations in the world.
Early Bird pricing is now available for DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018. Register before July 13 for discounted pricing: (https://events.itrevolution.com/us/register/). Early registration is highly recommended as this event has sold out all prior years.
The first round of speakers for the Las Vegas agenda includes:
Pauly Comtois, Vice President, Development and Operations, Hearst
Jason Cox, Director, Systems Engineering, The Walt Disney Company
Dr. Nicole Forsgren, CEO and Chief Scientist, DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA)
Courtney Kissler, Vice President, Nike Digital Platform Engineering, Nike
Thomas Limoncelli, SRE Manager, Stack Overflow, Inc.
Charity Majors, CEO and Co-Founder, Honeycomb
Dr. Topo Pal, Senior Director & Sr. Engineering Fellow, Capital One
Jeffrey Snover, Technical Fellow and Chief Architect for Azure Storage & Cloud Edge, Microsoft
Dr. Steven Spear, Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management, Principal, High Velocity Edge
“We are thrilled to reveal our exciting, first round of speakers for the DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas,” said Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook and Accelerate. “This year, we are focusing on many of the challenges that technology leaders face as they transform how work is done, often facing obstacles outside of Dev and Ops. These include project management and funding models, product management, compliance officers and regulators. It’s an exciting time to be a part of this movement as we broaden our sessions to focus on what leaders most need to know to succeed.”
About the DevOps Enterprise Summit The DevOps Enterprise Summit is a conference for technology and business leaders who are transforming how large, complex organizations deliver and operate software to help their organizations win in the marketplace.
Entering its third year in Europe and fifth year in the US, its goal is to accelerate DevOps adoption and increase the likelihood of those initiatives succeeding, enabling the cultural norms, technical practices and architectures that help organizations achieve the highest levels of performance.
The event features experience report and subject matter expert talks from technology leaders at top global brands that leverage DevOps to thrive within today’s software-driven economy. Through keynotes, breakout sessions, collaborative workshops and space to interact within an expo hall, attendees gain insights into the evolving technical and architectural practices and the methods needed to lead widespread change efforts in large organizations.
Share This: #DevOps Enterprise Summit #LasVegas 2018 announces 1st round of speakers: @jsnover @chawklady @jasonacox @mipsytipsy @yesthattom @TopoPal @nicolefv @paulycomtois & @StevenJSpear! Register now for early bird pricing: https://events.itrevolution.com/us/register/ @DOES_USA #DOES18
About IT Revolution
IT Revolution assembles technology leaders and practitioners through publishing, events, and research. Our goal is to elevate the state of technology work, quantify the economic and human costs associated with suboptimal IT performance, and to improve the lives of IT professionals.
The 4th annual DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) in San Francisco this week was, in my opinion, the best one yet. Lots to report about, but I wanted to call out a new trend I am seeing that I call the DevOps Cha-Cha. You remember the Cha-Cha: three steps forward, two steps back, cha-cha-cha. Actually besides being a great dance with the right beat, that same three-steps forward, two-steps back is about what you would expect from large enterprises that are undertaking profound digital transformations.
I say that this is normal because, despite all the great firsthand accounts of DevOps transformations on display at DOES this week, there was a bit of a whispered undercurrent. More than several people I spoke to talked about the fact that “this DevOps thing isn’t that easy.” Others spoke about the large number of “failed DevOps transformations or implementations.” Obviously, as the editor in chief of devopsy.kinsta.cloud, I might have a skewed view of this, but let me put in my 2 cents and then some on this subject.
DevOps Transformations Are Not Easy
First of all, no one ever said DevOps transformations would be easy. I’m not sure why anyone would even think that. Changing cultures can be gut-wrenching. Sometimes it means replacing people who just can’t wrap their heads around a new culture and way of doing things. Other times it means ripping up the way people and teams interact with job roles and positions. Change is never easy. Frankly, if it was easy, everyone would have done it already. That is just the cultural piece. Imagine coupling that with new tools, new processes and new ways of building, testing and deploying software. Again, I’m not sure why anyone would think such an undertaking would be easily accomplished.
Is anything truly worthwhile ever that easy, though? The real question is, Is the pain and trouble worth it? If you were at DOES this year or have read other success stories around DevOps and digital transformation, I think you will find the answer is, “You bet it is.”
If you go into a DevOps transformation thinking it is going to be easy, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Doing DevOps is not just a matter of being one of the cool kids on the block or trying something new for kicks. It means you are dedicated to seeing it through. It means you are going to think through, plan, learn and do what needs to be done.
Failure Is Not An Option
Also important to keep in mind—and this is really the meat of it—is that DevOps transformations shouldn’t and don’t proceed in a smooth linear manner. While at a macro level over a period of time you should be able to discern progress (depending on how you define progress), when you drill down you find fits and starts, steps forward followed by steps backward. There also will be steps sideways and sometimes no steps at all in any given moment. But like life itself, that is how DevOps transformations go.
I was speaking with someone at DOES (I don’t remember this moment who), who told me every business plan they had ever seen had revenue growth like a hockey stick—just straight up on sharp angle. The same is true for the benefits realized in every DevOps transformation plan. If only DevOps and life worked that way. It is the rare bird that has shows a revenue line that is straight and angled that way.
Real life is filled with starts and stops. You learn from your mistakes; you get it right the next time. Sometimes you need to take a step back to take more steps forward. DevOps is no different. It is not homogenized and doesn’t always (if at all) proceed smoothly. The real test is whether over a longer period of time you are achieving your goals (did you even define your goals or just thought DevOps would fix everything?). You can’t look at any given moment or event and say, “Our DevOps transformation was a failure.”
Your DevOps transformation is only a failure if you end it before you get started, or before you can overcome the roadblocks in the way. At its heart DevOps means we keep improving. Think of those failures and feedback loops. You do your post mortem, you learn from your mistakes and you keep plowing ahead. It is only a failure if you let it be one by stopping.
The DevOps Cha-Cha
In my opinion, you look at your failures during your DevOps transformation and you make lemonade from those lemons. You learn from them and keep moving forward, one foot after another. Imagine a hot Latin beat in your head. Start moving, one, two, one-two-three, one, two, one-two-three, that’s it—now you’re doing the DevOps Cha-Cha. Keep the beat, keep dancing and keep doing DevOps.
More DOES Coverage
If you are interested in hearing what some of the speakers, attendees and sponsors of DOES 2017 in San Francisco have to say, be sure to visit our DevOpsTV YouTube channel, where we have a DOES San Fran 2017 playlist. There are about a dozen videos up there now, but will be adding to that every day as editing completes.
In a special episode of Electric Cloud’s Continuous Discussions (#c9d9), Gene Kim and speakers from the upcoming DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco (DOES17) discussed the deployment age, and how DevOps practices and automation can unburden teams and boost productivity.
The panel included: Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop; Robin Yeman, fellow at Lockheed Martin; Courtney Kissler, VP of digital platform engineering at Nike; and, our very own Sam Fell and Anders Wallgren.
Continue reading for some of their top takeaways:
Kersten discusses the importance of spreading the word about DevOps tooling: “I think the best thing we can do is accelerate this turning point by giving the rest of those 15 million developers working in all of those other companies the tools that they need to apply these technical practice and to reorient their organizations to actually leverage them.”
Yeman on the multiplier effect of automation: “DevOps is definitely all about the people, but the automation enables people to have such a higher outcome and better business results. It’s almost like a force multiplier for companies.”
It’s crucial to look at the bigger picture of software delivery, advises Wallgren: “If you don’t have a big picture of what your value stream is from one end to the other, it’s hard to convince people that the problem they’re looking at is in fact not the right problem to be focusing on, or whether that is the right or wrong problem.”
Organizations that employ transformational leaders succeed, claims Kim: “We see people driving DevOps transformations in large complex organizations, specifically the DevOps enterprise community, and my claim would be that these people are being promoted at a rate far higher than the population at large. My interpretation of this is that the value that’s being created by these leaders is appreciated and they’re being put into roles where they’re being asked to make an even greater contribution across even a broader portion of the organization.”
You can’t just optimize for cost and efficiency anymore, explains Kissler: “There’s this realization that we’re all shipping software and really embracing that and understanding that organizations that have typically optimized for cost and efficiency are not going to win. And so, optimizing for speed to value, the value stream is a huge shift as well.”
Yeman explains the awesome leadership structure at Lockheed Martin: “At Lockheed, most business leaders were engineers at one point in time. So, if you’re looking at the President or the Vice President, they started out in software, or systems, or as a tester. They have to have depth in their area because then they can really empathize with what we’re building and with, you know, the people that are building it.”
More on the wonders of automation, per Kersten: “Agile has scaled up, but it kind of hit a brick wall until automation came into play and organizations realized that they needed reliable, predictable, and safe ways to deploy. I think one of the most interesting things that happened when the technical practice matured around that automation layer is all of the other gaps it uncovered.”
Wallgren on the ironic manual nature of the software delivery industry: “I think that one of the paradoxes of what we do in software teams is we don’t use software at all, most of the time, to help us produce our own software. We use people.”
Kim reflects on revelations after reading “Disrupt or Die” by Jedediah Yueh: “The real value that DevOps will create is not going to be in the FAANGs, the Facebook’s, Amazon’s, Apple’s, Netflix’s, and Google’s of the world, but it really is in the large brands in every industry vertical as they either disrupt, get digitally disrupted, or digitally disrupt themselves.”
Kissler on how to respond to the exponential growth of digital disruption: “I think the acknowledgement of where we’re at and where we need to go and how fast we can get there is a huge component of responding to the digital disruption.”
Watch the full episode:
Want more Continuous Discussions (#c9d9)? We hold our #c9d9 podcast every other Tuesday at 10 a.m. Pacific. Each episode features expert panelists talking about DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Agile and more.
Anders Wallgren is chief technology officer at Electric Cloud. Anders has over 25 years’ experience designing and building commercial software. Prior to joining Electric Cloud, he held executive positions at Aceva, Archistra, and Impresse and management positions at Macromedia (MACR), Common Ground Software, and Verity (VRTY), where he played critical technical leadership roles in delivering award winning technologies such as Macromedia’s Director 7. Anders holds a B.SC from MIT.
In the technology world, we are in a time of incredible disruption and innovation. Many years ago, my friend and “DevOps Handbook” co-author John Willis predicted that a decade from now, academics will call this period the “Cambrian explosion” — it was an incredibly vibrant 25-million year period that resulted in an incredible diversification of cellular life forms, including the appearance of complex, multi-cellular organisms, setting the stage for the diversity of life we see today.
Similarly, over the last decade, we’ve seen an explosion of incredible innovation and disruption in almost every area of technology: cloud computing, containers, virtualization; Agile, iterative development, continuous integration and deployment, and automated configuration management.
One can be forgiven if all this change is overwhelming; I think we’ve all had moments in our careers where we think, “I’m not sure if I I’m up to learning how to tackle this next big thing.” Even someone who loves learning can become cynical, or maybe just fatigued by change.
But most of us, maybe with some calm reflection, will recognize that there’s never been a more fun time to be in technology. And many of these new techniques and practices lead to massively better ways of working, where after an initial learning curve, we’d never go back to the old way. I believe this actually calls for excitement! And, I’m not alone.
We recently hosted a live chat with multiple leaders in technology who’ve spoken at past DevOps Enterprise Summit events. As we are in full prep mode for the next event in San Francisco this November, we asked our esteemed panel to share about their career journeys in tech and their passion for learning and change. It was a great pleasure to be able to pick the brains of Dominica DeGrandis from LeanKit, Dr. Nicole Forsgren from DORA, Erica Morrison from CSG International, Terri Potts from Raytheon and Robin Yeman from Lockheed Martin. During the course of the discussion, each person shared how they got their start in tech and many of the lessons they have learned over the past 20 years in the industry. It was echoed throughout the discussion that while things are rapidly evolving, it’s an exciting time filled with continuous opportunities to learn, plenty of room for growth and time to experiment with new tools and processes. For the full video replay and transcript of the discussion, please see below.
Also, don’t forget to register for the 2017 DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco to hear more from leaders in tech and get a glimpse into their organization’s journey into DevOps. Early Bird pricing discounts are available until July 31!
Gene Kim: Hello everybody, welcome to this episode of the DevOps Enterprise Summit live chat. We are assembled here today with a group of people I’ve known for years, and people who I genuinely admire. They’re all experts and leaders in the DevOps Enterprise community who are helping shape much of the practices that are going to almost certainly be commonplace in technology organizations over the next decade. Over the last 20 years I’ve been studying high-performing technology organizations, and more recently it’s led to studying transformational leaders and trying to understand how they became transformational leaders. What I find fascinating is there’s evidence to suggest that these are traits that you are not necessarily born with, but instead they’re actually learned.
Over the next hour, my goal is to learn about these leaders on this panel, their careers and experiences that shaped who they are today. My desired outcome is that we’ll all learn something that we can integrate into our own respective journeys. As you’ll surely find out over the next hour, these are all great people. As a reminder, the upcoming DevOps Enterprise San Francisco event is taking place on Nov. 13-15, and for more information visit events.itrevolution.com. And just a reminder, Early Bird pricing ends on July 31st.
Let’s go quickly around the panel, and everyone, if you could just introduce yourselves, name, company role, when did you present DevOps Enterprise and what did you speak on, and free to speak to share any professional accomplishment that you’re most proud of. Dominica, let’s start with you.
Dominica DeGrandis: All right. Well, I was a build engineer, spent 20 years bringing visibility to what version of what file was on what server in what environment. Currently, I am the Director of Training and Coaching at LeanKit. I’ve spoken at DevOps Enterprise Summit for four years in a row now, mostly speaking about experience reports and metrics and making things visible. And I guess, my most professional accomplishment, I think it would have to be finding my courage to get up in front of a group of people, and explain or present data, and demonstrate how to get leadership buy-in with metrics.
Kim: Awesome, thank you. Erica Morrison.
Erica Morrison: Hi, everyone. I’m the Director of Software Development and Operations at CSG International in Omaha. We’ve spoken the past couple years at DevOps Enterprise Summit chronicling our journey through the DevOps space, and we’ll continue to tell that journey. Something that I’m most proud of, probably the things that have brought the most challenges in my career have actually been in the DevOps space. We’ve undergone a fairly major transformation this past year, brought a number of teams through that, but one team in particular who have made substantial improvements as far as stability and automation. That’s been really something that’s been fun to be a part of.
Kim: By the way, following your experience reports has been my favorites among every year at DevOps Enterprise, fantastic. Robin.
Robin Yeman: Hey, I’m Robin Yeman, a Lockheed Martin fellow. I’ve been working in engineering about 23 years in the defense industry on everything from submarines to satellites, and everything in between. I think my biggest accomplishment is really being able to see the change. When I first started doing Agile in DevOps, you really couldn’t see it, but now I start getting contracts and RFPs from the customer repeating verbatim what I told them before. It’s cool to see that the influence is there. It might not be as fast as I’d like it, but it’s there.
Kim: That’s awesome, and then you spoke last two years of DevOps Enterprise San Francisco and London.
Yeman: You’re right. Yeah, the last two years on transforming large legacy organizations way back. A combination between Suzette Johnson from Northrop Grumman and myself from Lockheed Martin, because we both had very similar journeys.
Kim: Awesome. Thank you, Robin. Nicole.
Nicole Forsgren: Yes. Hello, I’m Nicole Forsgren, CEO and chief scientist at DevOps Research and Assessment, otherwise known as DORA. I spent years doing software development, enterprise storage at IBM, and then I went and got my Ph.D. that might be my professional accomplishment that I’m most proud of is that I’ve been studying and researching what’s basically known as DevOps for the last 10 years, and then applying it and bringing what I found to the industry and in my work with Gene and Jez Humble, and the team at Puppet on the State of DevOps Report. We all lived through that 2000 dot-com bust, and we saw many companies fail and I don’t want to see that again. Really helping to make an influence in the industry and make things a little bit better is an accomplishment for me.
Kim: Awesome, thank you Nicole, and you spoke in I think every year at DevOps Enterprise. Fantastic. Terri Potts.
Terri Potts: Hi, I’m Terri Potts. I’m from Raytheon Company, and I’m the Technical Director of the Software Development Organization. Like Robin, we are focused on doing mostly defense- and Intel community-related contracts. I started in the software development business actually in the Air Force and spent 11 years there, moving through the ranks and came to Raytheon, and moved on to be an architect after doing development for several years and have been a champion for technology transformation since the early 2000s.
I’ve spoken a few times at DevOps Enterprise Summit. Once about our legacy transformation since we have been around for long, and a lot of our code is quite old. Last year, I spoke about how you build up your staff of people that can support your DevOps transformation because it’s hard to just go out and hire those, some ideas around how to go do that.
Kim: Awesome, thank you much Terri. And by the way, I remember meeting you at the IBM Interconnect Conference in 2014, and you were actually one of the first announced speakers at DevOps Enterprise, very grateful for that.
First, let me just state an assumption I have that there’s actually never been a more fun time and exciting time to be in technology even though things are rapidly changing. Actually the pace of change is what’s causing much fear for many professionals about our livelihoods, our vocations, but I genuinely believe that the best times are ahead of us not behind us. Do you believe that? And if so, why? Erica could we start with you?
Morrison: Sure. I think about when I came out of college with a computer science degree, and I was focused on writing one language and writing that language well, and now we’ve got the proliferation of numerous different technologies, different languages. Like you said, the pace is moving much quicker. We actually hosted a hackathon here. We’ve done two of them for college students and just a number of different technologies that they use was absolutely mind-blowing to me, but I find it extremely interesting to continue to evolve for all these different things. It’s not just this one little dedicated space anymore, it’s constantly learning these new things which I love to do. Its new challenges everyday which keeps work interesting for us, makes work about being lifelong learners. I love that continuing to learn throughout our career, and it’s just focusing on learning different things now.
Kim: Awesome. Robin, how about you?
Yeman: I absolutely agree. I’d really think it’s the most exciting time. Just like Erica was saying, the college kids are coming in with 15, 20 different languages, they’re bringing all kinds of new technologies, they’re bringing gamification. They’ve really brought some different leadership styles. It’s very exciting. I know that some of our engineers get nervous, but if you just grab on and join the ride its fun.
Forsgren: Honestly, that’s one thing I love about technology. I mean, it kept me engaged, it kept me excited. Back when I was doing a bunch of development work, there was always something new to work on. As you said though, there’s always that other piece. There’s always the other side of it. We’re working in systems with growing complexity and that does make it really, really difficult, and that’s something that we’re seeing when we work with companies with DORA, in our assessment. You have to make sure that you can focus, but you need to know what your constraint is, particularly when we’re working on technology transformations. We need to make sure we can focus on the most important thing. We need to make sure that we can limit our whip, we can focus on our constraints, we can identify what the most important thing is that we don’t have sprawl and just contribute to technical debt. But, I think that’s what makes our work challenging and exciting and meaningful.
Potts: I love change, and that’s why my career has taken me where it has because the more different things you get into I think the more rounded you are, and the more you’re able to adapt new technologies. And the way I see it today is all the technology changes especially with the automation that many of us are going through that transformation, and I have always seen that as drudgery. If you’re working in some factory, let’s automate all the drudgery out, and then that gives us time on our teams to explore more around analytics or machine learning. That’s exciting for me.
Kim: Yes, you make it sound exciting. Dominica, you’re smiling.
DeGrandis: Well, I’m just thinking back at my first job out of school after I got my computer science degree. It was more configuration management back then, that was getting everything on the mag tape from IBM and putting that in a library, physical library somewhere safe in order to deploy it into production. But I think for me, it’s just the amount of opportunity there is now. There is this massive amount of opportunity for everyone whether they have a degree in computer science or not to go out there with all the sharing. The ability to share and learn now is much greater than it has been previously.
Kim: That is true. I mean, there’s never been a better time to be a learner. There’s no cost to entry it seems these days.
DeGrandis: Absolutely.
Kim: I suspect that this isn’t the first time that you’ve seen this dramatic change in the industry in your career. I’d love it if you could tell us about that time and how it affected your thinking about how you viewed your skills, your career, and where it took you. Robin, would you mind starting?
Yeman: Sure. When I first started we had a lot of ToR trend and ADA going on, and I was worried about the next generation of ADA, and whether they would even be able to keep up. So, just like that Dominica and the rest of the folks have said, I spent a lot of time at night trying to study, make sure I could stay on top of it because I was working with these amazing engineers and I just didn’t want to fall behind. I do the same thing now.
Kim: And by the way, I mean in a scale of 1 to 10 what level of fear did you feel? One is like it’s just another book no fear, 10 is existential fear of, “I might not be able to finish the book and therefore my career is over.”
Yeman: I work with some engineers—they’re smart that I was terrified. I’d say way up at 8 or 9 out of 10 because some people just get it quick and I have to work at it—I’m just not a natural. I was terrified.
Kim: by the way, it reminds me of learning Clojure very recently. It’s my first script language and I think I had to do 40 hours of reading before I could write a single line of code. It was just, it was very challenging, but very rewarding but all very intimidating. Nicole, how about you?
Forsgren: My first job in tech was when I was still in college, and it was on a mainframe. I was coming out of my associates in like ’99, and that was the big Y2K, everyone’s panicked, and it really fundamentally shaped what I thought about tech in many ways. Everyone was panicked, there was this big dot-com bust, and I alluded to this earlier, “Survival isn’t mandatory, companies can fail.”
That’s one piece where it really shaped what I do is that I don’t want to see companies fail. I’m sure you all have talked to me at conferences, and suddenly I just dig in, and I’m passionate. I have this drive to make sure we know we can find ways to help companies not fail, but it fundamentally affected me in a different way in that in the late ’90s, there was almost a tactical way to address the problem and it was teach everyone fundamental things. People look at me, they’re like, “How do you do mainframes?” It was mainframe, COBOL, Fortran and that was all we were teaching many students because we desperately had a very tactical need to make sure that when we hit 2000, the world didn’t end, technologically.
And then I did a bunch of consulting, and then I got a Ph.D., and then I was a professor. We’ve almost taken this other stance of we only want to or we’re very purposeful now, and I think it’s led to complexity sometimes in technology, but we want to make sure that we understand the purpose behind what we’re doing. We want to make sure that we have flexibility, we’re strategic, and we aren’t just tactical.
So, we designed the State of DevOps reports. They’re vendor and tool agnostic. We tell you about the principles that are important, the architectural designs that are important, the principles behind using version control are important. We aren’t going to tell you to use Git or Subversion, we’re going to tell you to use Subversion control. That’s the other thing that’s really impacted my career is that I need to make sure that if I walk into a situation I can tell someone from a conceptual level what’s really fundamentally important to improve their technology practice, and it won’t be tied to only a specific technology because that can end up being limiting. If you only tell someone teach someone a language, but not the fundamentals behind that language, it won’t work.
Kim: Principles are timeless and those things are not. Awesome, Terri.
Potts: When I think about this, the thing that comes to mind for me is probably about 20 years ago when systems software architecture started becoming a first-class citizen, at least at Raytheon. I remember seeing the first book, and one of my mentors saying, “Hey, I’m going to have a study group on software architecture do you want to join?” And I wanted to join and started seeing it as a way to grow my career, and be able to influence bigger parts of the system, and try to make things more maintainable, and really make good decisions going forward instead of just sort of stumbling into things. I wouldn’t say I was afraid, but I was really curious, and certainly felt like it was something that I needed to keep up with and did a lot of studying on my own outside of the office with study group, learning everything I can from them.
Kim: Sounds very interesting. In this case, it was like a mentor who actually sort of directed you down a certain direction. There seems to be a pattern of having great mentors. Fantastic, Dominica.
DeGrandis: When it comes to dramatic change, I have to say hands down 2005 or 2006. I was working at Corbis at the time managing environments, and we went from building out maintaining 25 servers to building out maintaining 250 servers over a period of 9 to 12 months. It was just impossible to manually build out servers. We had to start automating, and developers were like, “Builds take too long.” They wanted to put their own changes in their own dev integrated environment, and they took it seriously. They said, “Okay, then you get to own that dev environment like you build it, you maintain it. Then, I’ll just go build out maintain QA and staging inner prod.” That was huge dramatic change I think, and just being able to adapt to that and quickly was the biggest lesson for me there.
Kim: And specifically, was it dramatic because it was such a different way of doing things or it was dramatic because the role change and responsibilities for you, or what made it dramatic?
DeGrandis: Because for the previous six years we have had this process where we just dole out responsibilities, who’s doing what and how we’re doing it, and now that was turned on its head because we had to deliver faster, we had to deliver better quality, we had to get these environments up and running, and everything just exponentially grew with the number of servers and the number of environments. The way that I had been working for the last six years which had been fairly successful was completely different. That’s the second law of thermodynamics, everything is always in constant change and motion.
Kim: I love it. This is the famous story that’s in David Jay Anderson’s book, and in your upcoming book, Dominica. Fantastic, and Erica your dramatic changes in a certain point of your career.
Morrison: In addition to the ones that have been mentioned, there’s a couple that come to mind for me. First of all, the introduction of Agile. I started my career very waterfall. I probably wrote code for three to six months before I even chucked it in to the point that other people were using it which now is obviously mind-blowing to us, but that’s how we did software development back then. That’s been a major upheaval in pretty much all of our processes is around how we do software development.
I think overall, all these items point to the fact that software is constantly evolving, it’s not a static thing. When the next thing comes out we’re used to this evolution of change. It’s something that as developers, we just accept it, and look to learn the next best thing and how we get to evolve and continue to get better.
Kim: And physically what’s different or dramatic about the Agile transformation from your perspective?
Morrison: Pretty much everything about it, just the concept of batching work up into small little pieces. I’ve participated in helping roll out Agile with other teams, and it’s somewhat mind-blowing to these teams that you can take this big amount of work and you can even slice it up into one week or one day increments, and chuck that in and have this daily accountability with my team members. That test is now my responsibility and how am I going to automate that because as a developer, we want to automate that test as much as possible. It’s just much more of this integrated, fast-paced, all of us owning all the work and focusing on flow through the system.
Kim: I do remember that it was around 2005, we had just started our first experiments on Agile and even finishing something in a week was mind-blowing. That’s how long it took us to fill out the PRD forms usually. I love these amazing stories that you’re sharing. If you could compare yourself now to the person you were 20 years ago, what were the most important and significant differences between yourself now and yourself then? What skills did you have to develop? Nicole, let’s start with you.
Forsgren: Twenty years ago, as you think back, there’s no Facebook, there’s no Twitter, there was barely email. It existed, but not really. I mean, definitely all the technical skills, but for me learning how to be a leader and how to interact with people, and how to exert influence in a soft power sort of away.
Again, going back and talking to people that I knew 20 years ago there was learning how to do things in more of a nuanced sort of way, which you need to do when you’re managing large projects. For me, it’s been a soft skills thing. I always joke that technology is easy and people are hard, even as complex as technology can be. That was probably my biggest piece of learning.
Kim: In many parts what we work on, they’re all volunteer projects. And even the softer skills are necessary when everyone’s volunteering their time. Great, Terri.
Potts: Twenty years ago I was finishing up my last year in the Air Force and doing some leadership things, but much more as an individual contributor. I have a good view of what it was like to be on the Air Force side managing big contracts, and testing systems and operations. But since then I think that there have been a few things that I really had to develop. One was my network, the group of people that I learned from, and that has definitely grown in the last four years outside of Raytheon. I had a pretty good network within Raytheon, but once I met Gene and started participating in DevOps Enterprise Summits and the Forum, I just love how that career or that network has grown from there.
I’ve also always been interested in really staying with modern technologies and finding ways to make our teams more efficient, I think that’s always going to be something that’s changing. You always have to stay on top of what the latest thing is that’s helping your teams be more efficient. And the Agile transformation too because definitely we were waterfall all the way in the Air Force, and for the first several years that I was at Raytheon.
Kim: That’s interesting you mentioned network. One my favorite quotes is, “You’re only as smart as the average of the top five people you hang out with.” But I think what is interesting is when you can actually bring that network to help other people with their problems. It becomes a really powerful asset and the ideas of everyone.
DeGrandis: Well, I think 20 years ago, I assumed that everybody else knew what they were doing, and that if they were doing the right thing and I intended to feel like I didn’t know what I would. I didn’t know what was up, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just inundated with trying to learn quickly. And now I recognize that most people really don’t know what they’re doing. Nobody has all the answers and it’s absolutely okay to ask questions, and that in order to have your voice heard and become the voice of reason, how important metrics have been in order to present them in a way that others can understand.
Forsgren: Plus one on metrics. I will cheerlead for metrics all day long.
DeGrandis: I used to rant we don’t have automated testing, smoke tests take too long, and it just has got me nowhere. Now being able to present data calmly and confidently, to be the voice of reason in the organization is one of the greatest learning changes over the last 20 years. That and learning much more about Flow and Lean and Kanban and different methods out there—it’s why I wrote my book, Making Work Visible to help others see how to become the voice of reason. I think that’s super important one.
Kim: Awesome, we have a calm voice of reason. Excellent, Erica.
Morrison: I’ll echo the comments made about people and relationships, and, I think in college we don’t get an understanding that there’s nontechnical problems in addition to the technical ones. Really, we all look at the world differently and we’re going to have to understand that everyone that we work with isn’t going to have the exact same perception as us, and we need to partner together and get these diverse viewpoints, build these relationships, build these networks. That’s something that I probably didn’t get proper appreciation until maybe the midway through my career journey far. And I just wish someone had told me that earlier in my journey.
And then, I think appreciation for the ecosystem that we operate in I talked about that when I first came out of school as a computer science graduate. I was focused on my view of the world and the code I was writing, and I thought the big picture was understanding what the rest of the developers on my team were working on not understanding how do we deploy this code, how do we maintain it, what’s the infrastructure that we’re running on, how does our customer use this code. All those different sorts of things, which I we work on now to get that bigger picture for people, but that appreciation that that bigger picture makes you good at your specific piece of that. And then just that need to continuously improve yourself. It’s not about just being good with what you’re doing right now, it’s about looking at what’s next, how can I continue to evolve myself and improve myself that I can help move our company along.
Dominica: Well said Erica. Hear, hear!
Gene: I can resonate with all elements of that, but just to share a story. I was talking to a younger developer, he must been like around 25 hanging out with a bunch of ops people and I asked him, “Well, what are you doing here hanging out with a bunch of ops people?” He said something that I thought was hilarious, maybe not the most politically correct, but I couldn’t fault his curiosity. He said, “I just want to know where my code goes. To me it’s like I flushed it down the toilet and I just I’ve been doing it for two years, I just wonder where it goes.” Which I thought was unfortunate imagery, but man he was like, “Well I’m the minority of developers actually caring about the system as a whole.” Obviously, that made an impression on me.
One of the things that, if you go back to the topic of change, one of the things I hear a lot these days is how people in our profession often feel very uncertain about their own future, and specifically about how to maintain their own relevance. I’m thinking a person I met that I was actually able to interview on my blog, and yeah, he’s my age and despite having an MBA, despite having a Master’s in engineering management, despite being an expert in the theory of constraints, despite being an operations lead at Boeing, he wrote asking for career advice saying, “What do I do to make sure that I’m as relevant in five years as I am five years ago?” Specifically, what advice would you give someone who’s in operations and feeling like if they don’t take drastic measures they won’t be as relevant, and what actions would you recommend? Terri, why don’t we start with you?
Terri: I was thinking about this question, much of it depends on where he wants to take his career you have to know where you want to go, in order to put together a plan for how to get there. Given all of his degrees, and what he’s doing, it doesn’t seem like he really wants to go off and start re-architecting software or it didn’t sound to me like he would necessarily need to get a whole computer science degree. But if he wants to really understand how the automation works maybe he takes a few classes in Python or Ruby or one of the scripting languages to help with that, and get involved with that. But it seemed like it would be pretty drastic to go out because there’s lots of opportunities to lead transformations and he’s got those leadership skills apparently. I would say, “Look for the opportunities that really fit with your personality and your skills rather than going back to school for the answer.”
Gene: Indeed, and by the way, I just realized, sorry Robin! I didn’t forget your answer—could you say what advice would you give yourself 20 years ago, and what skills are most important? Then we’ll get back to our friend Pat Birkeland. Sorry, Pat.
Robin: Just like the others, I would say people and people skills. I was really type A and really driven building my code, and I thought the harder I work the more impact I would make, but as I got older I learned really the more that I build people around me the bigger impact I make. Being able to build those co-workers or people that work for me actually magnify that tenfold, and it just didn’t occur to me at that time. I would really focus on what you share. We tend to get rewarded for what we know, but if we rewarded people for what they share, you’d be amazed at what can happen.
Gene: Thanks Robin, and one of the things that I found impactful about your presentation even just in this last London event was you shared the story about how you had created this very informal community of people just sharing, and you met weekly or monthly, and 15 years later you’re still meeting, and then you’ve all sort of ascended together. Am I misremembering that story?
Robin: No, no, we’re actually still meeting and we’re building people. I think both me and Suzette [Johnson] are in the same boat because at the same time we were we were looking for others that would help us because we’ve started Agile pretty early in our careers, and we really needed any information. There just wasn’t a lot of like-minded groups to get together and build each other.
Gene: Awesome, and I guess if I were to sort of speculate that all are sort of very curious, all ambitious, all good at networking, and what a great collection people to learn from and collaborate with.
Gene: Awesome, thank you Robin. Let’s go back to this non-fictitious Pat Birkeland, he was generous in writing up some of his thoughts and experiences. Terri, your advice was the answer is not to go back to school, but maybe more crystal clear about where he wants to go in his own career and find opportunities. I love that. Dominica, your thoughts on Pat Birkeland.
Dominica: First of all, I could definitely relate because I had the same thoughts myself earlier, “Man, I should go back and get my Master’s. I need to. I just need another degree, make more letters at the end.” But really can’t do that because of working full time with little children at home. It’s just really hard. I didn’t have a nanny. I think that what somebody can do immediately is to learn the business better. Maybe just brought it again by a bit from the business perspective and see what the business challenges and risks are. And then, figure out how to reduce some of that risk maybe by making things a little bit more predictable to you. That’s going to be such a huge growth experience to go around, and maybe visit some of the other parts of the value stream and go look at the whole value stream, and see where things are stocking. And you got making that fall in faster.
Gene: That’s such an interesting piece of advice. And by the way, it reminds me, one of the things I was always envious, if I had to do my career over again, I would have loved to spend a couple years at a big four audit firm just because I was envious my friends who could actually see the big value statement, procure-to-pay, order the cash. It was something I was envious about, just even the language they spoke in. That totally resonates with me, Dominica. Erica.
Erica: One thing that I’ve told a number of our operations personnel that I’ve had this similar conversation with is “Good people will always find a way to be successful.” I’ll hire good people any day, and they’ll acquire those new skills. When it comes to being nervous about the situation I think as long as people are eager and willing to learn new things, they’re going to be successful. And then we as companies need to set them up for success. So they’re just personally able to talk with their manager and see if they have specific areas where they see that there’s opportunities for improvement. And then like Terri said, find your passion and invest in that particular area.
Gene: There’s no shortage of problems to be solved, I think is what you’re suggesting, Erica?
Erica: Exactly.
Gene: Yeah, that’s actually great. Pat, I hope you’re listening. I’ll have this transcribed for you. Robin.
Robin: The first thing I did when after the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London is to come back and tell everybody about Nicole’s research which stated that, “Transformational leaders really improve the likelihood of your success.” We’re short on those, I would think being able to build those folks around them and really drive, help the technical folks get things across to understand the value stream as Dominica said. I think there’s plenty of work to be done there, and that would be amazingly helpful.
Gene: That was great. In fact, I mean I do love the literature that says these transformational leadership traits are learned behaviors not that the old school was like these are things you’re born with. The great man theory, that you had to be born that way, otherwise you’re just, yeah, you’re just not wired that way. I think that’s exciting. Nicole, on Pat Birkeland.
Nicole: Yes, I would start by asking in an ideal world right, what would Pat be doing in six months, and in a year? And then, work backwards. What’s your ideal job? What do you want to be doing? And then what skills do you need? Because again you take a look at what he’s been doing, look at his credentials. He’s got an MBA, he’s a theory of constraints expert, and he has a master’s in engineering management. It sounds like he’s setup to be doing incredible things right now in leading a technology transformation. If he wants to be doing that, he might need to brush up on one or two specifics of a new technology in order to like really be able to speak to the developers or the operations staff on a few of his teams, but he might be there.
And it’s funny I say that especially as I was listening to what Dominica said she wanted a master’s so she could add letters. Some people walk up to me and they’ll say, “I want a Ph.D.” because I have a Ph.D., and I’m like why? And they look at me like like I want to be the only one at the Ph.D. I’m like, “No, like why do you want a Ph.D.? Don’t get a Ph.D. just for fun.” A Ph.D. is a research degree. If, for example, if Pat says I want to be doing research in six months or a year it’s going to take more than a year, then get a Ph.D., but if you want a Ph.D. because or if you want to degree because you want someone to know you have a degree that’s not the reason to get a degree. But if the job that you want in six months or a year is to be writing code, okay, then yeah then you’re going to need to either get a degree or do some Coursera or some Udemy or something. But if what you want to be doing in six months or a year is leading transformations, you’ve got it, you’re set.
Gene: There’s many easy ways to learn these days and Ph.D. is just one of them. By the way, if I could just go back to this and this more for me, but I remember a point in my career this must have must been, must be about 2005. And, I hear all these talk about “It’s easy to learn things, yeah, rah, rah. Change is good.” I remember when Microsoft changed their database interface – it would change from ODBC to ado.net, and the reaction I had was like, “This is crap. I do not want to learn another way to access database. This is horrible.” I had no appetite for that. I mean, sure you might have had encountered people who had that reaction, what advice would you give me in 2005? I’ll take any advice from anybody, otherwise I’ll call on.
Dominica: I’ve had friends, developers, who have been extremely frustrated at the continual change in the learning. But if they feel like they learned something really good, and then it just all changes again, and how frustrating that was for them, and it made them want to go be a business analyst. But, I think that is just the nature the demand. That’s the reality that we live in, and that there’s a need, we have to learn and adapt and changes are always there.
Terri: Right, I’ve had interesting reactions from people in our organization who seem to think that learning something new is going to threaten their job right like if you move to automated test then, perhaps they won’t have a job anymore. It’s always surprising to me when people don’t want to learn because learning is sort of what keeps me motivated and excited. Although sometimes, you feel maybe it’s a step too far beyond what your current skills are. But, yeah, there’s lots of, there’s lots of ways to do that these days and to figure out. And worse, if worst comes to worst get a few of your colleagues or friends that are in a similar boat, and you all want to learn about the same thing and you go through a course or a book together and maybe a group effort might make it a little more interesting, less intimidating.
Gene: It always helps to have a buddy is what I learned. Any other advice for Gene 2005 who is enraged by ado.net?
Robin: I would just say that it’s constantly changing, and that if you’re if you’re enraged by it you’re just going to be unhappy all the time. It’s almost like it’s just a given. You might as well try to learn to like it or pretend you do.
Gene: Awesome, Robin.
Dominica: Do you think though that there’s one thing that hasn’t been talked about yet, is this sense of fear that people have. They were really good at something and they knew this technology and they were at the top of their game, everybody went to them to ask advice on this one thing and now that’s changing. That’s scary for a lot of people like “Wow, just a year ago, I was awesome at this and now everything’s changed and what the heck do I do now? I mean look at some project managers now with the whole coming out of waterfall and PMI and Gantt charts. And now all that’s being shifted upside down and where are they going to go now?” I think addressing that fear of what people used to be really good at and now that’s gone is real.
Terri: Those are really good points Dominica.
Gene: And by the way, I had no illusions that I was good at ODBC. I mean, I was barely competent. I felt like their people are just randomly shuffling chairs just to force people to upgrade from Windows 95 or whatever it was just, I saw no value in it. Yeah, but I loved that it is a fact of life and something genuinely miraculous. It’s like, who would want to go back to the old way?
We did a webinar. It was on the topic of how to get your DevOps Enterprise submission accepted to the conference, and one of the people who was on that panel was Margo Cronin. She was an Enterprise Architect at Zurich Insurance and she’s now at AWS, but we actually accepted her through the CFP process. It was fantastic to see her perspectives and the advice that she gave, but one of the things that she said really made an impression on me. She said, “Have confidence that you have an interesting story to tell.” I think she even said, “Just because you’re not the lead developer or using the new cutting-edge technologies that’s not necessarily as interesting as someone who’s helping drive behavior change and transformation in large organizations.” Do you agree with her? And if so, what advice would you expound to anyone who has a story to share, but maybe are hesitant to. Let me call on you Dominica. And Dominica this is great because you’re on the programming committee.
Dominica: I hear this a lot! People don’t feel like they have a story to share, but everybody does. It’s a different perspective that they can bring and there’s a lot of similar nuances that we all go through, but I think to hear, especially somebody that we haven’t heard from before, a new fresh perspective and their challenges always makes for an interesting story.
Gene: Maybe you can shed a little light outcomes of the process right now. We’re looking at every one of these submissions and we are looking for interesting stories.
Dominica: Yeah, how many submissions did we have for San Francisco?
Gene: It’s over 250 almost 300.
Dominica: Yeah, going through all of those is a challenge and one thing that I really look for is original, real wording of people telling a real story and not shying away from using their own language. I don’t think people feel should feel that they have to conform to using the book-written perfect language in a submission. Just say whatever—what’s the problem, why it matters, what they did about it. The real story that’s what I want to hear what worked, what didn’t work, what was some of the failures, and where they are right now, and where they hope to go.
Gene: Great. Yeah, the lull of deliberation. In fact, one of the things that maybe most people might not know is just the level of the intensity of some of these debates of who we accept in the conference. I mean is that something that gets very, very heated. I’m not sure it was actually hung up and out of the meetings, but sometimes very close. Erica, how about you?
Erica: So, yes I actually had a conversation with a co-worker of mine after we attended a local DevOps meetup here, and she said, “I would love to at some point work towards a goal of presenting at this [event].” And she actually comes from a non-technical background and she has participated in a lot of the same things that I have in our DevOps journey and I said, “You know, I think it would be interesting to hear the same story told through your eyes, and I think it would be a different story than my version of it, and just the different things that stick out to you and were amazing to you.” I really encouraged her and I said, “I’d like to hear this story.” Even just the two of us telling that same journey, different perspectives on that are very, very interesting.
Gene: And are you referring to the portion of the presentation you gave last year, which was when a dev manager takes over ops?
Erica: Yes, yup.
Gene: I would love to hear that story. In fact, three of your colleagues actually did submit through the CFP. I’m eager to see where that goes. Thank you for any encouragement that you gave them. Thanks Erica. Robin.
Robin: Just like Erica, I think everybody has a story to tell, and through another person’s eyes it’s a whole different perspective. Sometimes the things that we do every day seems commonplace. That happens to me all the time, but then, when you tell somebody else they’re like, “Wow, I didn’t even know that existed or how would you even do that.” I think, again, just having confidence in yourself and realizing you actually have something unique to sell other people is what you need to do.
Gene: Interesting, thanks. Nicole.
Nicole: Yes, sometimes when I think about what might be a good topic to talk about when I go to conferences, I think about things that I do pretty commonplace or things that are pretty easy and think about what used to not be super easy, right? If it’s a process that I’ve done or a process or what we’re working through right now, and then what that journey has looked like. Right? Because if I can do it now, and it’s pretty easy, and it’s almost habit or reflex, when was it not a habit and reflex. And then, how did I get here? What were the steps that I got here? Did we have a checklist? What were the crazy hurdles? Because if it’s easy for me now and it probably wasn’t easy for me at some point, I had to learn to get there. That’s probably going to be useful or at least interesting to someone.
And then, write that up. And then, that’s the story, but then writing it up I think is another piece. And like Dominica said, I’m on a budget program committee, write it up that when I’m reading 300 submissions or a 1,000 submissions it stands out to me and it’s interesting I can tell you’re going to have some personality onstage and let the audience know what they’ll get out of it. That’s when they read it in the brochure, they know like which talks to go to. What takeaways am I going to get from this? Am I going to have a few tips and tricks? Am I going to know what to avoid? Am I going to know where to start? Those are some tips in terms of like writing submissions. And sometimes I forget when I write my own submissions, so none of us are perfect.
Gene: Awesome.
Nicole: Keep trying. I mean, I still get CFPs rejected. We all do.
Gene: No, it’s so true. Terri Potts.
Terri: Yeah, I do this a lot with people in my organization because moving up the career chain at Raytheon often requires you if you want to stay technical to start presenting. First maybe internally within Raytheon and then externally.
Nicole: I love that.
Terri: Yeah, so a lot of times people think, “Wow, what I do? That’s boring.” I try to just have a conversation with them to get them to tell me some of the things that they’ve done recently. And some of the things I really like to hear about is, “Okay, you started using Puppet or you started using Chef, did that just go perfectly the first time?” “Well, no we tried this and that didn’t work. Then we did this.” I’m like, other people would love to hear that they don’t make those same mistakes. So write something up to say these are things that we found that work really well and these are things that we found that didn’t work so well, so don’t repeat those mistakes.”
Gene: That’s great. As a professional conference goer, I mean I love one of my favorite variances like the internal technology conferences because this is a hope of the shared context that’s already shared. There’s a mercenary reason why you want to help people within your own organization that isn’t present in a more industry-wide conference. I mean I just really I got to attend the one at Capital One and at Nationwide Insurance. I just, they really stand out in my memories. Just incredibly unique experiences and so great for internal technologists to be able to show off the amazing things they’ve done.
All right, we’re almost out of time, one last question. I think a theme that’s come up over and over again is we’re lifelong learners. Learning is part of the game, in this game that we’re playing. Learning is definitely part of it whether we like it or not. Hopefully, we’d like it far more than we don’t. What are your top resources for learning? Maybe answer two ways—of all time and maybe right now here in the moment. Erica, let’s start with you.
Erica: Sure. Of all time, once upon a time I had like my C++ book that I referenced all the time before I really even used Google, so there was those sorts of things. But, much more recently, I rely heavily on Twitter, and a lot of the things that I see on Twitter and on leaders in the DevOps space, and what are they reading, what are the things that they’re tweeting about. There’s obviously books like The DevOps Handbook. And The Phoenix Project and I try read probably about one book at a time, but then I like to just see what’s going on space. Yeah, I’ll see whether there’s a conference going on and I’ll go look for that conference and what’s going on with that conference and the slides that are coming out of that, and that helps me stay current. And then just rely on co-workers as well. They’ll send out emails and different articles that they’ve read.
Gene: That’s awesome. By the way, one of the things I just want to punctuate is several of you mentioned, it always helps to learn with co-workers. I mean I remember teaching myself JavaScript in React, and it was incredibly gratifying, but it was horrible beyond words because there were like 40 tools I had to learn what they were and I didn’t care. Just that it always helps to have a buddy in learning things. I love that pattern. Thank you, Erica. Robin, top resource for learning.
Robin: So, I again I follow Twitter just like our counterparts here. I am a big fan of LinkedIn, I read LinkedIn and read the latest things there. I have a membership to Safari Books. They always have the latest technology books which I just love. And I read the blogs. It’s interesting because you get many different perspectives on the different blogs you hear and what Mike Cohen thinks is cool and Ken Schrader, and then you turn around and hear David Anderson. Maybe they don’t all play nice in the sandbox, but it’s interesting to hear what they have to say.
Gene: Twitter, it is interesting and we always used to dismiss it as a toy, but more and more I find it interesting just to some of the most interesting reading comes from what other than what my friends are reading. Interesting Robin. Nicole.
Nicole: For my overall best learning it’s probably my Ph.D. because it taught me how to do a lot of critical thinking, statistical thinking, pulling things apart, how to design, and critically pull apart research and think about things in a really concrete, consistent, detailed way. And then overall in today, Twitter, news sites. I try to make sure I keep it as well-rounded as possible. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, and I try to keep up on what my friends are reading, but then I also try to occasionally do a random search to get exposure to things that my friends aren’t reading.
Gene: Great. Thank you, Nicole. Terri.
Terri: Let’s see, far all time, I mean I’ve kept a membership for IEEE and ACM for years just trying to keep track of what’s going on, but now things are a lot more electronic. Some of the things I do regularly is I try to listen to most of the Software Engineering Daily podcast episodes.
Gene: Oh, great.
Terri: And all the SE-org podcasts, which they’ve had a tremendous amount of podcasts that I found really, really useful. And of course, I do go to a few conferences every year, so I’ve learned a lot at DevOps Enterprise Summit, and this year I presented at the SEI’s Architecture and Technology User Network Conference, and it was really, really good to see the amount of architecture work going on around figuring out how to transform legacy systems and architect for automation in this assembly.
Gene: That’s great. And by the way, I echo your endorsement of the Software Engineering podcast as they have great people in there.
Nicole: Yeah, and I’ll plus on IEEE and ACM. ACM Queue has been really fantastic.
Gene: Yes, and then last is Dominica.
Dominica: Yeah, I’ve learned much from watching TedTalks. That’s one of the greatest sources of learning for me for years now. I mean Hans Rosling, “Let my dataset change your mindset”—in 20 minutes what you can learn from that. Or David McCandless in “The beauty of data visualization”—just phenomenal. And then the DevOps Enterprise Summit videos over the last four or five years, from the tech side great, great learning resources straight up on YouTube, easy to get to.
Gene: Awesome, yeah, because there’s a YouTube channel you can just subscribe to it, and then you’ll be notified whatever there’s a new one. In fact I was going through them last night. Awesome, well, hey thank you much. I so much appreciate your time and you sharing all of your experiences. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and I think we were actually going to be writing this up that people can actually access it in written form and the summary of it.
I look forward to seeing you all soon, one way or another. At the very latest at DevOps Enterprise in San Francisco. I hope you’ve learned as much as I have today.
Thank you to all the panelists who are doing amazing work in all your respective organizations, and you will be able to see them too Nov. 13-15 at DevOps Enterprise in San Francisco. It’s at the Hilton Union Square location and look for updates on the website at events.itrevolution.com. In fact, we’ll be announcing more speakers in the next week or two as we start processing the CFP submissions. And just a reminder, last reminder early bird ticket pricing ends on July 31 be sure to register soon for a 20 percent discount!
With that, thank you much Erica Morrison, Robin Yeman, Nicole Forsgren, Terri Potts, and Dominica DeGrandis. See you next time, all.
Anders Wallgren is chief technology officer at Electric Cloud. Anders has over 25 years’ experience designing and building commercial software. Prior to joining Electric Cloud, he held executive positions at Aceva, Archistra, and Impresse and management positions at Macromedia (MACR), Common Ground Software, and Verity (VRTY), where he played critical technical leadership roles in delivering award winning technologies such as Macromedia’s Director 7. Anders holds a 
