Last week’s attempt at full automation failed and pointed out a shortcoming or two. I hope that’s all ironed out (time will tell). It also highlights the need to think of always starting from a clean slate. My theory is, a cached version of the newsletter was stored on MailChimp. When I enabled the automation for web site to e-mail, MailChimp observed 115 as new and shipped it. Hopefully, you get this while I’m sleeping and everything works wonderfully. Ha! I was in Raleigh and Durham this week for several meetings and collaborative efforts. A HUGE thank you to everyone that attended the Triangle DevOps Meetup on Wednesday. Y’all showed up in crappy weather before the most anticipated shoe blowouts of the year. Seriously though, thank you. I met some great people from far away lands and the discussion afterward was delightful. This week I’m holding down the fort outside Detroit. I plan on attending the Orchestructure meetup and you should come too! The week after that the family and I are on vacation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. If you’re there and want to grab a Mai Thai, let me know. ...

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 ...