Leading DevOps

Make you jump on some of these sessions.  You should have some extra time without the commutes. https://www.alldaydevops.com/spring-break

When you go to the gym and workout, wait, when you work out at home, you goal is to push your body to point where it is uncomfortable or failure.  This produces change in your strength or overall fitness.  If you just do what is easy, your fitness doesn't improve.   How does this apply to business?   Do you deploy changes during month ends?  Holidays? Black Friday? Do you push your teams to not be ok with even small failures? Do you push teams to never have an outage? Do you test your systems for failure? Do you test your environment for security issues? Do you challenge your people to think about the business or just their silo? Do you accept statements like, "We just need to hire more people." If you want to scale and grow your business, you have to squeeze your company to see what fails.  This is a way to make it stronger and ready for when your company takes off and has hyper growth.  The company culture has to be on...

Every company is impacted by this virus. Here are some high level ways 1. Their business model revolves around gatherings of people and they can't afford to continue. 2. Users can't work remote or companies remote work is not mature enough. 3. Service industry but there is no one to service. These are some of the big impacts I see due to Covid but every company is impacted.  There will be companies hurt and set back financially but there will be others that innovate and pivot.  This isn't a time to be slow and methodical but experiment, take risk and agile.  Companies should be hype focused and not distracted by low value items, put them on hold.  Focus on high value objects even more than ever.  Hyper focus and fast to react.   Leadership should be communicating their priorities and plans, even if they don't directly impact everyone on the team.  Don't leave people in the dark.  You never know when that engineer or ops person ha...

This is really week one of the US being impacted by Corona Virus.  3/16.  Many schools, churches and business are closed and many others are work remote.  All sports are on hold. There are two categories of people speaking out.  1. What is the big deal? 2. We need to shut everything down. I am not going to rant on either one of these because generally the right spot is somewhere in the middle. As leaders we should see were things are going and be ahead of the curve for our people.  Last week it was clear that things were about to get worse.  Many people are returning from business trips and vacations.  The community spread was going to start. This was an opportunity for leaders to show people they matter with out increasing fear. Leaders should be communicating how this virus is affecting or going to affect the business. Those that could work from home should been made to go virtual. This was a simple step to show you are important and we...

Look across your teams and the people you are trying to hire.  Where are you struggling?  Which teams look just like they did 2 years ago?  Which teams are excelling and providing the most value to your customer? I bet you have a few teams that have very smart, experienced leaders that work hard.  They have been with you for years and your teams or tech would fail without them.  This is great right? I propose that your teams are not the real problem.  The problem is the leadership of the teams.  Your team or organizational leaders should change every year or two.  Teams need to be pushed toward new tech, fresh ideas and improved processes.  Teams must be energized and motivated.  I know an organization that has the same leadership from the top executive down to the team leads for over 10 years.  They now their customer and systems very well but very little innovation or improvements have come in years.  They are falling b...

You should be listening to one technical podcast a day or you are making a huge mistake.  There is too much to learn and to experience from other people to think you can Google everything you need to know.   The great thing about podcast is they tell you things you didn't know, you needed to know.  Technical podcast about another company or business will open you mind to knew ideas and concepts.  If you commute to work and are listing to the radio or music, stop doing that.  You are impacting you growth as IT professional.  This is the time to grow beyond your current thoughts and skills.  They used to say, you are as smart as the average of your closest friends.  I think you are as smart as the 5 top podcast you listen to frequently.   I recommend listening to a work related podcast on the way to work.  This will get you in the right frame of mind and thinking about new things before you are hammered with emails and Sla...

This is my favorite all time Dilbert.  We are starting to see vendors providing containers for their apps.  It is clear the industry still doesn't understand how containers are run or should be run.  One of my coworkers was excited to let me know his vendor has a containerized app and needs it deployed.  Do you know the tech stack? Do they provide a configuration file with it? What OS does it run on? Can it run in Kubernetes? ummm, ummm, let me ask. Even better than this, the vendor's answer was, "just copy the container to a server and give us access to set it up".  OMG.   Not No but Hell No.