Strong opinions, loosely held: is a state of mind I’ve been striving to achieve both personally and professionally. Coming from a military background, this is an incredibly hard thing to do. The Air Force, despite its rank and structure, optimized itself around free-thinking innovation. You could easily come in and punch the clock and leave at the end of the day in the Air Force. But, if you wanted to go further, it helped if you thought outside the box. As you can imagine, me thinking outside a Department of Defense box was pretty much modus operandi. I didn’t do anything crazy with secret information or weird infrastructure bits that wouldn’t scale. But, I certainly pushed the outer limits of outside the box thinking and had to defend it at all costs. This meant my opinion had to be so strongly held as it flew in the face of the “by the book” types that my ideas would succeed and not be sabotaged as the thought floated up the often lengthy chain of command. These days, my opinions are based on experience, assessment, and achievability. These are all fine things that are quite defensible. But, it’s better to let the opinion be presented on merit and let others come around to it as opposed to forcing it through. It is okay to have a strong opinion about something. But, do not shutdown outside ideas as a result of your strong opinion. Be agile and adept. Don’t death grip your ideas, be open to free thinking. ...

If you follow me on Twitter, you know I spent the first half of the week in Raleigh attending All Things Open and hanging out with my opensource.com family. All Things Open is one of my most looked forward to conferences of the year. I had already committed to attending before I moved to Detroit and I’m so glad I was able to go. One of the coolest things I did while there was announcing a new Opensource.com DevOps Team with Jason Hibbets on the main stage after my lightning talk. Join us on this journey! It’s going to be awesome! [Video] Continuous Delivery 101 from GoCD This video series covers the history of CD, concepts, best practices, how to get started, and popular tools. You’ll gain a holistic view of continuous delivery and a deeper understanding and appreciation of critical concepts. SPONSORED I read Last Week in AWS religiously and you should too Corey Quinn’s Last Week in AWS: You Had Me at Free (Tier) SPONSORED ...

Is DevOps dying? I’ve had this thought for a few weeks now. Since DevOpsDays Detroit when Richard I. Cook, M.D. sat shaking his head at Gene Kim on stage in a panel discussion titled, “DevOps, Safety, And Lean”. Like a concept twisted by bad marketing DevOps has become almost a cult. There are those that practice it religiously and others that cannot adhere to every tenet every moment of every day but do try to “DevOps”. Site Reliability Engineering has gained significant ground. As have many other practices and ideas that if embraced would balance the future of information work. Those of us in DevOps often forget where we came from. Never doing a deploy while the sun is up, only on the lowest traffic period, and rarely completed within the allotted time slot. Damn near anything was better than those days. Let’s not be too high and mighty about DevOps. We all should focus on making things better for everyone. I’ll be in Raleigh at All Things Open this week. If you’re around definitely come say hello and get a DevOps’ish sticker. Also, come check out my lightning talk on Tuesday. ...

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. ...