0800-DEVOPS

Bryan Finster is a Distinguished Engineer at Defense Unicorns and a relentless searcher for better ways of working – not by following prescribed frameworks but by gaining situational awareness and recognizing specific contextual improvements. We discussed a topic that stirred an otherwise dull summer – McKinsey’s report on measuring developer productivity.
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This interview is featured in 0800-DEVOPS #53 - Measuring developer productivity with Bryan Finster.
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(0:00)
Introduction
(2:40)
McKinsey report on measuring developer productivity
(9:25)
DORA metrics
(11:44)
Using and abusing DORA metrics
(16:14)
Abusing metrics
(17:40)
Improving the organization
(23:30)
Tips on taking metrics
(26:10)
Following recommendations

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Nathen Harvey needs little introduction in DevOps community. He is Developer Advocate at Google, co-author of State of DevOps Report and co-author of a great book called “97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know”. We talked about insights and surprises from this year’s State of DevOps Report. And Nathen shared his view on recent hot takes that “DevOps is dead” 🙂
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Show notes:
- 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report – The latest Report is out! As always, it’s full of valuable insights with a special focus on software supply chain security and a lot of actionable suggestions on how to start improving in the security domain.
- Nathen recommends following the work of John Speed Meyers and Dave Farley. Don't miss Dave's book "Modern Software Engineering".

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Christina Wodtke worked in the product development space in companies such as Zynga, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Yahoo. She is also a Stanford professor and author of several books, most notably The Team That Managed Itself and Radical Focus. Her experience in developing teams is precious - we talked about empowered teams, OKRs, and the 2nd edition of her bestseller Radical Focus.
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Show notes:

• This interview is featured in 0800-DEVOPS #24 - Empowered teams with Christina Wodtke.
• The 2nd edition of Radical Focus went public on April 20th, 2021

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John Willis is another absolute legend in software delivery and DevOps, an industry veteran working at companies such as Docker and evangelizing good technical practices. He is the co-author of The DevOps Handbook, Beyond The Phoenix Project and Investments Unlimited, and lately, he published an incredible book on Dr. William Edwards Deming called "Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge."
I thought I knew everything there was to know about Dr. Deming - after all, what is there to know - watch out for seven data points in a row above or beyond the average and do something - and that's it! Except it's not! :)
Through his book and by hanging out with him in a weekly book club, John took me on the journey of exploring Deming, and at times, it felt like going through an escape room - just as I thought I understood everything, I'd find a new door and a whole new world. This episode is a glimpse into John's book and our ongoing conversations with the hope that we will also spark interest for Deming in others.
🙌 Help me spread DevOps ideas even further by voting for the 0800-DEVOPS podcast for DevOps Dozen 2023 award in the “4. Best DevOps Related Podcast Series (Audio Only)” category - I truly appreciate it! You can cast your vote here.
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Show notes:
John Willis' Ignite talk: "Devops and Dr Deming’s 14 Points" (Velocity NY 2014) - YouTube
This interview is featured in 0800-DEVOPS #57 - Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge with John Willis.
[Check out podcast chapters if available on your podcast platform or use links below]
(0:01)
Introduction
(1:32)
How John started exploring Dr. Deming
(11:17)
The System of Profound Knowledge
(21:25)
An example of PDSA working in an organization
(30:50)
Key experiences that shaped Dr. Deming's work
(42:14)
DevOps and Dr. Deming's 14 Points
(44:07)
Book recommendations

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Charity Majors is CTO and co-founder at Honeycomb, book author, speaker, and a person unselfishly sharing her views and lessons from both leadership and engineering perspective. I talked to Charity about engineering management and platform engineering, how long you should sharpen your technical saw before thinking about a management role, and whether it is ok for managers to feel useless sometimes :)
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This interview is featured in 0800-DEVOPS #44 - The Engineering/Management Pendulum with Charity Majors.
[Check out podcast chapters if available on your podcast platform or use links below]

(6:37)
"The greatest technologists in the world that I know have all done some time as managers. They all have that skill set. But they are never too far away, never too many years removed from being an IC themselves, because there is wisdom you get from dealing with the technology that you can't get from sitting several layers away."
(11:55)
"As a manager, you can't make decisions in a vacuum the way you could as an engineer. There is no such thing as a good decision independent of other people because all decisions involve other people."
(18:14)
"Engineers don't typically go, "I'm done with coding forever. I wanna be a manager ". They want to try things. They want to go back and forth. Most organizations haven't figured out how to incentivize this or how to support people in doing it."
(18:55)
"You want to optimize not for people becoming more powerful in one role but for them staying curious and engaged."
(23:10)
"Management is just a bunch of skills. People don't have to become managers in order to learn those skills."
(25:35)
"People should have some agency in what team they want to go to."
(29:55)
"Platform Engineering is a form of operationally focused software engineering where your customers are internal instead of external."
(31:20)
"You give them all these tools so they can own their own code in production, not so you can own it for them."
(34:52)
"The experience of running software is one that has been consistently devalued and marginalized when it comes to software engineering teams. They typically don't give enough respect to just how difficult and traumatic it can be. There is a sense you get from having run big complex systems for a long time. You can sense where the holes are."

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