0800-DEVOPS

Clarissa Lucas is IT Audit Director, speaker, and book author. I loved talking to her because, for most of my professional career, I was dealing with the technical aspects of delivering software solutions. And I remember many times I was freaking out because I saw that "we", the technical people, and "they", the non-technical people, were not aligned on how we delivered software. Clarissa comes from that other side of the fence and is working hard to achieve the alignment of delivery and audit. We talked about auditing with agility and tearing down the fence between delivery teams and auditors.
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This interview is featured in 0800-DEVOPS #46 - Auditing with agility with Clarissa Lucas.
[Check out podcast chapters if available on your podcast platform or use links below]
(01:16)
Introduction
(02:36)
What is the role of Audit?
(06:18)
How is audit traditionally performed in enterprise organizations?
(12:38)
A different way of collaborating with delivery teams
(16:58)
Modern software development practices vs. traditional audit approach
(21:08)
CABs and manual checks
(28:03)
Advice on getting Audit people on-board with process improvements
(30:20)
Understanding the Audit perspective (walk in their shoes)
(33:40)
The upcoming book "Beyond Agile Auditing"
(37:11)
Book recommendations, people to follow

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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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Scott Prugh is CTO at CSG International and one of the people I admire a lot for his perseverance and dedication in making a 35-yo large enterprise embrace modern ways of working. He is an active member of the DevOps community and a member of the DevOps Enterprise Summit conference programming committee. We had a great conversation about their DevOps transformation at CSG. Folks at large enterprise organizations – don’t miss this!
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Show notes:
- This interview is featured in 0800-DEVOPS #34 - DevOps transformation with Scott Prugh
- DevOps Portfolio Management slides by Scott Prugh
- Scott recommends: Kill it With Fire by Marianne Bellotti, John Cutler, Melissa Perri
- Scott's weekly DevOps Digest

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Heidi Helfand is VP of Engineering Growth at Kin Insurance and the author of Dynamic Reteaming, a book that casts a whole new light on forming and growing teams. In these fast-moving times, changing your team formation effectively is the most sought-after organizational superpower. I talked to Heidi about fundamental reteaming patterns and her experience in growing organizations.
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Show notes:
- This interview is featured in 0800-DEVOPS #30 - Dynamic Reteaming with Heidi Helfand.
- Book link: Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams 2nd Edition

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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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