Here are some criteria which should be useful when trying to cut through the tangled mess of “DevOps” job titles in order to work out if a prospective role will actually lead to working within a DevOps culture, or whether you’ll be stuck in an old-school IT silo with a fancy “DevOps” name tag and the same crappy us-and-them mentality.
Continue reading Questions to ask when applying for DevOps jobs
[#encouragedevops] In the talks and break-out sessions at DevOpsDays London, in conversations at London Continuous Delivery meetup group, in numerous blog posts and articles talking about introducing a DevOps culture (e.g. http://devopsnet.com/, http://www.stephen-smith.co.uk/), and based on my own experience of organisations I have worked within, it is clear there are three key practical steps which an organisation can take in order to encourage a DevOps culture of collaborative, cross-functional, product-focused working which leads to more effective delivery of software-based services.
(I’ll be blogging about each one of these steps over the next few weeks with the tag #encouragedevops)
Includes recommended reading for software operability: SoftwareOperability.com
Operability is not something which can be ‘bolted on’ or retrofitted to software after it goes live; we need to design and build our software with operability as a first-class concern. You don’t build a bridge, then try to add load-bearing capabilities at the end of the project — but most software projects try to do exactly that, typically with costly results.
Ultimately, the product owner should be responsible for ensuring that operational requirements are prioritized alongside end-user features. If you are responsible for the software product or service, there is only one answer to the question
Who Owns My Operability?
Update: the site now shows selected recommended reading on each page load.
(With a nod to whoownsmyavailability.com)
I have published a set of workshop notes on Github called Build Your Own Website – A Beginner’s Guide, covering the basics of HTML and WordPress-driven websites. I gave the workshop at a recent Engineering Day event at thetrainline.com, where the audience was largely non-engineers from marketing/finance/HR etc., and it was interesting and useful to return to the first principles of HTML in ways accessible to novices.
Continue reading Tutorial – How to build your own website using HTML and WordPress
Alex Papadimoulis (@apapadimoulis) of Inedo (and TheDailyWTF) gave a really useful talk on deployments for cloud-based software systems at QConLondon 2013 recently [slides, PDF, 1.6MB].
He stressed the importance of finding the appropriate deployment (distribution + delivery) model for each application, and to keep deployments as simple as possible. In fact, we can follow the best practices from Continuous Integration and apply them to deployment.
Continue reading Cloud Deployments – Alex Papadimoulis at QConLondon 2013
Matthew Skelton 