The Idealcast with Gene Kim by IT Revolution - Personal DevOps Aha Moments, the Rise of Infrastructure, and the DevOps Enterprise Scenius: Interviews with The DevOps Handbook Coauthors (Part 1 of 2: Patrick Debois and John Willis)

Personal DevOps Aha Moments, the Rise of Infrastructure, and the DevOps Enterprise Scenius: Interviews with The DevOps Handbook Coauthors (Part 1 of 2: Patrick Debois and John Willis)

12/16/21 • 139 min

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The Idealcast with Gene Kim by IT Revolution

In part one of this two-part episode on The DevOpsHandbook, Second Edition, Gene Kim speaks with coauthors Patrick Debois and John Willis about the past, present, and future of DevOps. By sharing their personal stories and experiences, Kim, Debois, and Willis discuss the scenius that inspired the book, and why and how the DevOps movement took hold around the world.

They also examine the updated content in the book, including new case studies, updated metrics, and practices. Finally, they each share the new lessons they have learned since writing the handbook and the future challenges they think DevOps professionals need to solve for the future.
Kim will conclude the series in Part 2, where he interviews the remaining two coauthors, Jez Humble and Dr. Nicole Forsgren.

ABOUT THE GUEST(S)

Patrick Debois is considered to be the godfather of the DevOps movement after he coined the term DevOps accidentally in 2008. Through his work, he creates synergies projects and operations by using Agile techniques in development, project management, and system administration. He has worked in several companies such as Atlassian, Zender, and VRT Media Lab. Currently, he is a Labs Researcher at Synk and an independent IT consultant.

John Willis an author and Senior Director of the Global Transformation Office at Red Hat.. He has been an active force in the IT management industry for over 35 years. Willis’ experience includes being the Director of Ecosystem Development at Docker, the VP of Solutions for Socketplane, the VP of Training and Services at Opscode. He also founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award-winning IBM business partner, which specializes in deploying Tivoli technology for the enterprise.

Patrick DeBois and John Willis are two of five coauthors of The DevOps Handbook along with Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Nicole Forsgren, PhD.

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT

The DevOps origin story from coining the term, why it took off, to launching the DevOps Days conference as an offshoot of the velocity conference.
How people thought of DevOps when it was first presented (their reactions, their mentalities, and their willingness to adopt it).
What has changed in the DevOps world since the first edition of The DevOps Handbook was published.
How the rise of SaaS companies is altering the DevOps world and participating in its evolution, and how building solid relationships with SaaS vendors and communicating comprehensive feedback to them is integral to DevOps.
The significance of speed in changing team dynamics.
Why resilient companies like Google and Amazon engineer chaos, and why companies like Toyota are happy when production stoppages happen.
Why you can’t afford to provide a high variety of products if you also offer high product variation.

RESOURCES

Get The DevOps Handbook (Second Edition)
Nudge vs Shove: A Conversation With Richard Thaler
Solaris Zones wiki
Agile Conference in Toronto 2008
Sys Advent article: In Defense of the Modern Day JVM (Java Virtual Machine) by Gene Kim
Mob programming
Breaking Traditional IT Paradigms to... (San Francisco 2015)
Crowdsourcing Technology Governance (Las Vegas 2018)
Laying Down the Tracks for Technical Change at Comcast (Las Vegas 2020)
10+ Deploys Per Day by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond
10+ Deploys Per Day
How chaos engineering works at Vanguard
Patrick DeBois tweet mapping out all the failure modes of an online conference.
Jesse Robins LinkedIn
Jesse Robbins on Twitter
How A Hotel Company Ran $30B of Revenue In Containers (Las Vegas 2020) by Dwayne Holmes

ABOUT THE GUEST(S)

Patrick DeBois and John Willis are two of five coauthors of The DevOps Handbook along with Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Nicole Forsgren, PhD.

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT

The DevOps origin story from coining the term, why it took off, to launching the DevOps Days conference as an offshoot of the velocity conference.
How people thought of DevOps when it was first presented (their reactions, their mentalities, and their willingness to adopt it).
What has changed in the DevOps world since the first edition of The DevOps Handbook was published.
How the rise of SaaS companies is altering the DevOps world and participating in its evolution, and how building solid relationships with SaaS vendors and communicating comprehensive feedback to them is integral to DevOps.
The significance of speed in changing team dynamics.
Why resilient companies like Google and Amazon engineer chaos, and why companies like Toyota are happy when production stoppages happen.
Why you can’t afford to provide a high variety of products if you also offer high product variation.

RESOURCES

Get The DevOps Handbook (Second Edition)
Nudge vs Shove: A Conversation With Richard Thaler
Solaris Zones wiki
Agile Conference in Toronto 2008
Sys Advent article: In Defense of the Modern Day JVM (Java Virtual Machine) by Gene Kim
Mob programming
Breaking Traditional IT Paradigms to... (San Francisco 2015)
Crowdsourcing Technology Governance (Las Vegas 2018)
Laying Down the Tracks for Technical Change at Comcast (Las Vegas 2020)
10+ Deploys Per Day by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond
10+ Deploys Per Day
How chaos engineering works at Vanguard
Patrick DeBois tweet mapping out all the failure modes of an online conference.
Jesse Robins LinkedIn
Jesse Robbins on Twitter
How A Hotel Company Ran $30B of Revenue In Containers (Las Vegas 2020) by Dwayne Holmes

Previous Episode

undefined - Simplifying The Inventory Management Systems at the World’s Largest Retailer Using Functional Programming Principles with Scott Havens

Simplifying The Inventory Management Systems at the World’s Largest Retailer Using Functional Programming Principles with Scott Havens

In this episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Scott Havens, who is the Director of Engineering at Wayfair, where he leads Engineering for the Wayfair Fulfillment Network. Havens is a leading proponent of applying functional programming principles to technical and organizational design. Previously, Havens was the architect for Walmart's global omnichannel inventory system, unifying availability and replenishment for the largest company in the world by revenue.

Havens shares his views on what makes great architecture great. He details what happened when an API call required 23 other synchronous procedures calls to return a correct answer. He discusses the challenges of managing inventory at Wal-Mart, how one implements event sourcing patterns on that scale, and the functional programming principles that it depends upon. Lastly, he talks about how much category theory you need to know to do functional programming and considerations when creating code in complex systems.

Before listening to this interview, please listen to Episode 22, which provides Scott Havens's 2019 DevOps Enterprise Summit talk with commentary from Gene Kim.

ABOUT THE GUEST(S)

Scott Havens is a Director of Engineering at Wayfair, where he leads Engineering for the Wayfair Fulfillment Network. Scott cares deeply about scalable data-intensive software systems; he is a leading proponent of applying functional programming principles to technical and organizational design. Previously, Havens was a Director of Engineering at Jet.com and was the architect for Walmart's global omnichannel inventory system, unifying availability and replenishment for the largest company in the world by revenue.

In his home life, Havens enjoys good food, good wine, bad movies, and asking his daughter to stop "redecorating" his Minecraft castles, pretty please.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-havens/

Twitter: @ScottHavens

Email: [email protected]

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT

His views on what makes great architectures great
The details on what happened when an API call requires 23 other synchronous procedures calls to return a correct answer
How one implements event sourcing patterns on a large scale, using Wal-Mart as an example, and the functional programming principles it depends upon
The challenges of managing inventory at Wal-Mart
How much category theory to know to do functional programming

RESOURCES

TIMESTAMPS

[00:24] Intro

[02:23] Meet Scott Havens

[03:48] How architecture fits in functional programming

[04:48] Event source systems at Wal-Mart

[19:45] The effects and behaviors

[22:36] Duality of code and data

[26:13] Currying

[32:34] How the 23 service teams’s world change

[40:56] Hallmarks of great architecture

[51:10] How he replaced the dominant architecture at Wal-Mart

[56:46] Configurations and speculations with couplings

[1:03:51] How can simple systems suffer from problems like this

[1:09:11] Idempotence, Clojure and side effect

[1:17:01] Issues ...

Next Episode

undefined - Behind The State of DevOps Research, Favorite Aha Moments, and Where They Are Now: Interviews with The DevOps Handbook Coauthors (Part 2 of 2: Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble)

Behind The State of DevOps Research, Favorite Aha Moments, and Where They Are Now: Interviews with The DevOps Handbook Coauthors (Part 2 of 2: Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble)

In part two of this two-part episode on The DevOpsHandbook, Second Edition, Gene Kim speaks with coauthors Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble about the past and current state of DevOps. Forsgren and Humble share with Kim their DevOps aha moments and what has been the most interesting thing they’ve learned since the book was released in 2016.

Jez discusses the architectural properties of the programming language PHP and what it has in common with ASP.NET. He also talks about the anguish he felt when Mike Nygard’s book, Release It!, was published while he was working on his book, Continuous Delivery.

Forsgren talks about how it feels to see the findings from the State of DevOps research so widely used and cited within the technology community. She explains the importance of finding the link between technology performance and organizational performance as well as what she's learned about the importance of culture and how it can make or break an organization.

Humble, Forsgren, and Kim each share their favorite case studies in The DevOps Handbook.

ABOUT THE GUEST(S)

Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble are two of five coauthors of The DevOps Handbook along with Gene Kim, Patrick Debois and John Willis.

Forsgren, PhD, is a Partner at Microsoft Research. She is coauthor of the Shingo Publication Award-winning book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and The DevOps Handbook, 2nd Ed., and is best known as lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She has been a successful entrepreneur (with an exit to Google), professor, performance engineer, and sysadmin. Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals.

Humble is co-author of Lean Enterprise, the Jolt Award-winning Continuous Delivery, and The DevOps Handbook. He has spent his career tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in companies of varying sizes across three continents, most recently working for the US Federal Government at 18F. As well as serving as DORA’s CTO, Jez teaches at UC Berkeley.

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT

Projects Jez and Gene worked on together before The DevOps Handbook came out.
What life is like for Jez as a site reliability engineer at Google and what he’s learned.
The story behind his DevOps aha moment in 2004, working on a large software project involving 70 developers.
The architectural properties of his favorite programming language PHP, what it has in common with ASP.NET, and the importance of being able to get fast feedback while building something.
The anguish that Jez felt when Mike Nygard’s book, Release It!, came out, wondering if there was still a need for the book he was working on, which was Continuous Delivery.
“Testing on the Toilet” and other structures for creating distributed learning across an organization and why this is important to create a genuine learning dynamic.
What Dr. Forsgren is working on now as Partner of Microsoft Research.
Some of Dr. Forsgren’s goals as we work together on the State of DevOps research and how it feel to have those findings so widely used and cited within the technology community.
The importance of finding the link between technology performance and organizational performance and why it probably was so elusive for at least 40 years in the research community.
What Dr. Forsgren has learned about the importance of culture, how it can make or break an organization, and the importance of great leadership.