Leading DevOps

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.