I Love #DevOpsDays!
I love the diversity.
I love the inclusion.
I love the speakers.
I love the OpenSpaces.
I love the cost.
After a conference like this, I like to do a recap of the event with salient talking points, what I learned, and what I did. For this I'm not sure I'm going to do a very good job, as I was stuck in the neither world of trying to live-tweet and take notes at the same time. I'm fairly good at doing one or the other, but I didn't do a great job of both concurrently.
Keynote #1: Tech for Good
DevOps Days kicked off with an inspiring talk from the CIO of the City of St Paul: Sharon Kennedy Vickers on the Impact of Technology. Technology can be incredibly powerful but also insulating. When you question WHY technology is used, the WAYS in which technology can be applied can have the greatest impact for the good of the community.
How can you apply this? The recipe is simple: User-Centered, Inclusive, co-creation. User-centered refers to accessibility: is everyone able to access the technology? Inclusivity means diversity, diversity of thought, diversity of race, gender, religion, ability, everything. Co-creation is the best of all: create the technology together. Don't just collect the inputs and deliver the product: built it together.
Keynote #2: Collaborating and Containing Chaos
Amy Patton from SPS Commerce introduced us to the concept of chaos as she recounted her first day SPS Commerce: Black Friday 2016(?). SPS's journey to DevOps was born out of a need to improve efficiency to solve problems faster. "In chaos, there is opportunity for positive change." This may or may not be a direct quote from Ms Patton.
So, how do you foster collaboration? Shared interests and common goals. SPS has built communities called "Guilds") around different aspects of technology. There are guilds for Monitoring, Data Science, Book Clubs, even a Breakfast Club for Programming. Participation is optional, but it brings people together to learn and share.
Quantify collaboration through the use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Ms. Patton gives examples of metrics that might be helpful in measuring collaboration:
- Days since last deploy
- Deployment success rate
- Incidents in last 90 days
- Mean Time To Recover(MTTR) / Mean Time Between Incidents(MTBI)
NOTE: this was my most retweeted comment from the conference. This is important.
Keynote #3: From Intent to Impact
I got distracted in the sponsors area, and totally missed the start of Lanice Sims talk. Her talk spoke of granting and building trust in workers to make the right decisions. And having processes in place to support those workers when things go wrong.
No one intends to f*ckup, but if you don't own up to it and be transparent about the f*ckup then customers and collaborators will lose trust in you and go find support some place else.
Failure Management processes should include retrospectives, root cause analysis and transparency throughout. Practice these processes so that when the big sh*t happens, you'll be prepared.
NOTE: I hesitate to put an NSFW tag on this talk, because it was really awesome. It's not particularly kid friendly.
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