The Ship Show

2015 was the year that we saw the issue of systemic, professional burnout make its unfortunate entrance onto the stage of high technology and DevOps. In this episode, we interview the world's foremost expert on burnout, Dr. Christina Maslach, a psychology professor and researcher at UC Berkeley about burnout, its causes and effects, and most importantly: what we can do about it. It's been a year since a series of events started the conversation in our industry and it has all but died back down again. But for people, teams, and organizations struggling with burnout, it remains a critical issue for the industry to confront. Join the entire Ship Show Crew and Dr. Maslach for a very special episode of the podcast: Extinguishing Burnout.

The DevOps community has long resisted a push to define the movement via instruments like cookbooks or manifestos, creating an interesting thread of "lack-of-definition" when describing DevOps and DevOps practices. This issue has come to a head in 2015, as some proponents think we're long overdue to provide a stronger framework around what DevOps actually means in practice. For episode 59, we sit down with the creator of the DevOps Checklist, Steve Pereira, to talk through the items on the checklist, whether or not it's a good idea to even have a checklist, and debate the finer points of what could become: The DevOps Checklist Manifesto.

Back in 2013, Pager Duty's Ranjib Dey surmised that it would take ages for traditional operations teams to learn and adopt mainstream development technologies. The opinion sparked quite a lively discussion around what those mainstream development technologies are, what hurdles exist for operations team to adopt them, and whether it all would be as glacial as Dey guessed. For Episode 58, we welcome Ranjib to the show for a panel discussion to revisit the tweet and look to see if anything has improved in the last 2 years. Join the panel as we parse through the puzzle of: We May Have DevOps, But Does Ops Have the Dev?

So many of the companies who build the tools we use daily take special care to cultivate and nurture a community of users. But that doesn't just happen magically. For episode 57, we sit down with community managers from Chef, Perforce, and VictorOps to talk to them about their experiences building community, the difficulties with community engagement, getting the business to see the value, and what community is really made of. Join us as we talk to the folks responsible for Managing the CommunityOps

If DevOps is CAMS--culture, automation, metrics, and sharing--then it makes sense there'd be a conference on monitoring and metrics...and there is: Monitorama! In episode 56, the crew gets together with Jason Dixon, aka obfuscurity, the founder of Monitorama to talk about the fourth incarnation of the conference. We do a deep dive into what all is encompassed when we say "monitoring," why monitoring really isn't about CPU load and memory, other things you can monitor, and why Paul was stupid for not coming to Monitorama earlier; join us, the crew as: We Monitor the Monitorama

Do you test? Do you want to test? For many operations and build/release engineers (and even some developers!), testing can be a bit of a foreign concept. It's hard to pay attention to getting to 100% code coverage on your unit tests for your inrastructure cookbooks and manifests when the infrastructure is on fire! But... maybe that's why it's on fire? For this episode, Mike McGarr walks us through the nuts and bolts of testing, so we can all become better testers, and start integrating testing into our workflows, even if we're not developers. Join us for: I Don't Always Test, But When I Do...

It's a part of software developers hate writing and operations teams hate dealing with: packaging, installers, and upgrade scenarios. In Episode 54, the team looks at the fundamentals of packaging, tools that make the job both harder and easier, installer horror stories, and some good practices to make sure your packages don't make others want to rip their hair out. Join the crew as we provide some tips for: Packaging Your Software for Maximum Freshness.

It's been awhile, but we're finally back, and special guest Katherine Daniels (aka @beerops) is with us to talk over career development in a DevOps context! We discuss All The Things related to leveling up your career, including specialization vs. generalists, training and learning (especially if you don't have a degree in computer sciency things), and some techniques you can employ to make sure your career doesn't stagnate! Join us as we delve into: Developing CareerOps

When looking at all the organizations that are doing interesting technological, cultural, and scaling things in the DevOps space, one of the common architectural patterns is the use of microservices. For episode 52, the panel sits down to talk a bit about microservices: what they are, the benefits they provide, the costs, the issues around releasing, deploying, and operating microservices-based applications, in an attempt to figure out whether they're the future or a fad and what, exactly, should make you pay attention and start investigating whether that old monolithic application should be sliced and diced into a microservice-utopia. Join us as we talk through: Managing the Magic of Microservices

Has it really been five years since the Patrick Debois launched the first DevOps Days in Ghent Belgium?! Turns out: time flies when developers and operations are getting along and getting bits shipped. We sit down with an all-star panel, live from DevOps Days Ghent, including Dave Mangot, Steve Pereira, Kris Buytaert, Gareth Rushgrove, John Willis, and the father himself, Patrick Debois to discuss what the first few DevOps Days were like, how it became an international mainstay of the DevOps Community, where DevOps has been in the last five years and where it's going in the next five, and what to make of "Enterprise DevOps"; join us for: Five Years of DevOps (and Its Days)