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Last week, I enabled a workflow to automate more of the DevOps’ish process. One thing I did not test as a part of this workflow was link tracking. To be honest, I did not think it would matter. That assumption bit me hard. Within minutes, reports from readers came in saying Gmail was flagging the links in the e-mail as suspicious. As it turns out, disabling the link tracking also bypassed a bug in Mailchimp’s platform. When the automation kicked off with link tracking enabled it triggered the bug in the Mailchimp platform. My apologies for ever making you question the validity of the e-mails for this newsletter. The lesson I’ve re-learned here is never to trust your assumptions. Trust but verify all features. Mailchimp is working on the bug and gave me a very viable workaround. E-mail is hard, y’all. I’ve managed email delivery at a few companies now. If you think it’s easy, try doing it en masse, at scale. It’s a constant game of give and take that you win and lose at often. Mailchimp is a real delight to work with and I appreciate their support. ...

This week was very interesting filled with unusual experiences. Shared learning is a tenet of DevOps so allow me to share my experiences with you. Hopefully, we all get better as a result. Let’s break down two experiences from this week. You may have noticed on Twitter or in last week’s newsletter some mention about a webinar I was planning to take part in with Scalyr. I have canceled that. We were going to discuss DevOps in a Kubernetes world. I still might discuss that at some point with another audience. But, I’m not going to talk about it with the Scalyr team. It came down to something elementary, don’t insult anyone. Don’t make light of ANYONE even jokingly in a professional e-mail. With e-mail, there is no sarcasm, no tone, and context can sometimes be cloudy. Especially don’t insult yourself and your profession. I had a nice chat with Scalyr’s VP of Marketing and have forwarded the e-mails to CNCF (Scalyr reached out via the CNCF Speaker’s Bureau). I hope Scalyr has learned a valuable lesson. If you see Scalyr being even the slightest bit untoward, let me know, I’ll address it with them. Be the person you want your peers to epitomize. ...

If you received this e-mail, it means we all made it through another Groundhog Day here in the US (it’s a real “holiday”). The movie, starring Bill Murray, is hands down, bar none one of the best movies ever made. A curmudgeonly news reporter is sent to cover a groundhog (Marmota monax, also called “woodchuck”) peeking out of its hole; if it sees its shadow, it means six more weeks of winter. But the reporter ends up repeating the same day over and over again until he gets his poop in a group. It ends happily, but the journey was truly formative. Again, this movie is up there with some of the best. It is a lot like DevOps (or any kind of orchestrated change). You show up intending to do one thing and end up having to do a bunch of other stuff. Then you start measuring, optimizing, and you start getting to the stuff in the backlog. You’ll get through some of that backlog at a good clip once you have processes in place to handle day-to-day operations. Once you’re executing at a high level like this, things get easier to optimize. There’s a Trough of Disillusionment along the way, but it does end happily most of the time. The journey might be more torture than learning at times, but you need to stick to it. The outcome is the goal, not the tools or how you got to it. ...

I’m struggling to write an intro this week (probably broke a rib). But, I did write a tweet that got a lot more attention than I thought it would this week. I’d like to talk about it: This is not to say I decline every meeting invite I get. It’s to say that if an invite is not complete (an agenda, location, time, etc.) I’m highly likely to decline it. Also, if there doesn’t appear to be value in my going versus something else I could be doing I will typically decline stating the reason politely. In general, I enjoy the meetings I get invited to because I love the work I’m doing. But, I did decline a meeting invite a little bit ago. Use Lead Time Metric to Improve Your CI/CD Process Check out GoCD’s latest blog in CD Metrics series. It talks about what lead time mean in CD context and guide you how to identify bottlenecks and improve your CI/CD process. SPONSORED ...

I spent most of the week in Raleigh, North Carolina in and around Red Hat Tower. I was in a two-day All Product Marketing Summit. My boss is so amazing though. She asked how I was holding up at one point (that’s what builds psychological safety). My response, “This is kinda close to my personal hell. Not trying to be dramatic. But, ya, I’m super uncomfortable.” Then something rather Red Hat happened. Red Hat investors approve $34B merger agreement with IBM. Jim Whitehurst decided to take the investor call to certify the investor vote in the Red Hat Annex where we were having our meeting. Jim is a dynamic leader. His time as COO at Delta made him appreciate process, rigor, and discipline. When he came to Red Hat, he adapted in a way most leaders might never have been able to. After the investor call, Jim decided to talk to us group of technical and product marketers. This is not your stereotypical group of marketing folks; there are Kubernetes and Ansible contributors in the room as well as Red Hat product contributors. ...