Achieving DevOps

Sharing some lessons I learned from my local gym, and how to create lasting change by thinking small... tiny even! We pull some great stuff from "The Power of Habit" and the Crossfit craze, and talk about how this can help set you up for success - personally and at work. 

We wrap up our 3-part discussion with Abel Wang of Microsoft. Here's where the rubber hits the road - Abel talks with us about the importance of testing, the power of feature flags (Abel’s a tireless advocate for LaunchDarkly, one of our faves), how eliminating flaky tests is key, and Dynatrace.

Part 2 of 3. We continue talking with Abel about feature flags and how to handle estimates so quality is never on the chopping block. 

Our first 3-part interview!  I love the energy Abel brings to the table, and his background as a serious coder makes his advice both pragmatic and spot on. He’s a fantastic speaker as well, if you’ve ever had the chance to catch him at a conference. (Check out his latest from Build 2018!) He wrote the foreword to my book, and with our conversation we got a chance to revisit some of the things we love most about DevOps and where we see the movement going in the future.

It's simply not true that the DevOps "unicorns" out there don't make mistakes. They simply do a better job of learning from and not repeating them, and this often starts with the art of the blameless postmortem. Join Jane Miceli and I as we bat around what makes blameless postmortems such a powerful - even fundamental - tool in your DevOps arsenal.  For a longer written account, check out our blog article on the subject. Happy failing!

In the book, Ben's team makes a single list of the "nonfunctional requirements" and shortcuts they've had to make - technical debt - their first step. Why is this important? We'll talk about Plimsoll lines, the BTE ratio at Microsoft, and why exposing technical debt should be your first step to recovery.

A quick 30-second introduction to the show.