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My week started with a migraine Monday afternoon. My week ended with a right ear infection. I spent two days dead to the world. Having to take a knee and heal sucks. If a team can’t handle a member taking a sick day, something has broken in the team building process. Any member of a team should be able to call in sick without any other team member feeling like a ball will get dropped. Humans are going to get sick, humans are going to fail, and the team should be able to adjust to that. If it can’t, the team is in dire shape and a holistic strategic assessment should happen. The team is likely trying to do too much, move too fast, or does not have enough skilled people. If that’s the case, sharpen the ole business skills and make the case for whatever it is the team needs. Make sure the team literally stays healthy. Join Our Research Group — GoCD Take our short survey for the chance to join a great group of continuous delivery practitioners in our research group. You’ll be eligible to get your name on our contributors list, and win great schwag, and gift cards. SPONSORED ...

As part of the Open Spaces at DevOpsDays Raleigh, the group decided to do a “Book Club” to share interesting books, podcasts, etc. that would be interesting to us DevOps folks. The members of the conversation were Magnus Hedemark (thanks for tweeting all these), Nirmal Mehta, John Willis, Aaron Huslage, and myself. Here is a compiled list from that discussion: Note: DevOps’ish may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs. The End of Heaven: Disaster and Suffering in a Scientific Age by Sidney Dekker — Accidents and disasters have become technical problems without inherent purpose. When told of a disaster, we easily feel lost in the steely emptiness of technical languages of engineering or medicine. Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software by Michael T. Nygard — A single dramatic software failure can cost a company millions of dollars — but can be avoided with simple changes to design and architecture. Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler — Semler turned his family’s business, the aging Semco corporation of Brazil, into the most revolutionary business success story of our time. By eliminating unneeded layers of management and allowing employees unprecedented democracy in the workplace, he created a company that challenged the old ways and blazed a path to success in an uncertain economy. ...

I had the pleasure to travel to our South Florida office this week. I participated in five quarterly planning meetings and Bankrate’s 2nd Hackathon. The quarterly planning meetings were pretty cool. It was interesting to see what all our dev teams were going to be pushing forward with for the year. But, the highlight of the week was the Hackathon. There were some incredibly creative ideas built around the Bankrate platform that I’m sure a few will be brought into our products soon. I had the modest goal of standing up a Kubernetes cluster in AWS and deploying an example app to it. Luckily I had enough support from our team of Phippineers to make it happen. Phippineers you ask? Several members of the team have only heard me talk about Kubernetes. The first thing I asked the team to do was to watch The Children’s Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes to get an idea of the concepts at play. In the guide, a cute little giraffe named Phippy represents a PHP app looking for a home. The team latched on to this and off we went using Terraform to roll out CoreOS Tectonic to AWS. There were some bumps along the way and at one point I was almost ready to throw in the towel. But, with some help from various CoreOS folks on Twitter we got everything up and running. One of the devs on the team set out assembling a Laravel app to be deployed to the cluster. They marveled at the ability to roll out multiple versions of the app, scale up the whole cluster, and scale it back down by editing a variable here or there. It was an awesome experience! My team didn’t win any prizes or accolades but we definitely took a huge leap towards our future infrastructure. ...

Is your organization a learning organization? Do you, your team, your leadership, and your company learn from mistakes? Do you share knowledge and lessons learned as widely as humanly possible? These are all question you should be asking yourself along your journey. If your maintenance windows are no holds bar with no rollback plan, that’s a problem. If you are not doing something to share new technologies with your team on a regular basis you’re going to have a bad time. Continuous learning is such a critical aspect of DevOps and working in tech that you must reinforce it at every possible opportunity. I’ll be in South Florida this week hopefully doing some continuous learning. You can’t buy DevOps, but you may have to sell it — GoCD This new blog series aims to help DevOps leaders in organization get stakeholder buy-in. It covers approaches to talking about why, as well as specific things you can do to sell your ideas. SPONSORED ...

Build versus Buy? It’s a question I usually asks candidates during interviews. There is really only one good answer; buy until you can build it better for cheaper. This doesn’t mean outsource everything. This doesn’t mean you won’t be hacking together cool things. It means that you have the business sense to know that you have core competencies that are either still forming, your team is small, or you have enough to manage in-house already. Sure, everyone wants to build everything they use. You get better by building, your team takes pride in building, but at some point, you build yourself into a box. Then what? Then you buy your way out of it at what is likely a higher cost to your business than buying at the beginning. Remember, your technical debt started the second you released code. Free continuous delivery eBook from GoCD This free reference guide will take you back to the basics. You’ll find visuals and definitions on key concepts and questions you need to answer about your teams to determine your readiness for continuous delivery. Download and share with your team. SPONSORED ...