Comments for Principia

Comment on Grinding my gears. Marketeers (again) by Dan

Dan — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 03:49:14 +0000

Much like your last post, I can relate to this regularly. You can also apply this to vendor webinars where the title of the presentation is never answered.

Comment on Marketing claims by Grinding my gears. Marketeers (again) « Principia

Grinding my gears. Marketeers (again) « Principia — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:16:33 +0000

[...] About Me « Marketing claims [...]

Comment on Really? by Really? Redux « Principia

Really? Redux « Principia — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:46:45 +0000

[...] About Me « Really? [...]

Comment on DevOps; another ‘new’ thing that ain’t by John Allspaw

John Allspaw — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 19:46:59 +0000

The concept of ‘actively seek cross-silo collaboration’ is quite broken (even if you’ve never seen such a thing) in many technology-driven organizations today, and of course you’re 100% right that the entire organization should be doing it. I’m dubious of anything that suggests that dev/ops cooperation is somehow singularly tasked with fixing an entire organization. I’m not aware of anything that says such a thing, but I’ve been wrong before.

Also: Ted was misinformed in that post that ‘DevOps’ is somehow a “methodology”. (it’s not)

You seem to understand the idea, but are upset about the proliferation of the term? Successful companies also understand this concept, no matter what the term used, and try to contribute to the communities that experience the real pain on topics (like O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference, LISA/Usenix, GOTO/JAOO, etc.)

Saturday afternoon related watching, entirely driven on these points by leaders in the field:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx8OBeNmaWw

Continuous deployment requires dev and ops cooperation, to add another relating point, and any research on successful companies recognize this, even if they don’t use that word (i.e., Facebook, Amazon, Flickr, Etsy, IMVU, Wealthfront, etc.)

But, I’m not commenting to convince you. Just passed by your post and saw that you’re angry about a word and thought you’d be interested in some other interpretations.

Good luck!

Comment on DevOps; another ‘new’ thing that ain’t by Mark

Mark — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 15:16:38 +0000

Just to clarify, my HR comment was not a claim that the term was invented by HR (not sure how it could be read that way, but there you go), it was an observation that HR recruiters tend to just call up a label instead of looking at the actual role requirements. Thanks for the link. Having read the slides, I remain unconvinced. Don't get me wrong, as I suggested in my original post, I am fully behind the idea that silos should be broken (in fact I've spent most of my career doing exactly that), but I still think the term DevOps contributes virtually nothing to this effort, in fact it may even be harmful. Why single out DevOps? Why not tackle the root problem, breaking down the silo mentality of the organisation? This can be done many different ways and singling out DevOps could actually harm the effort by making people think that it is the solution to their woes (rather than being just one small symptom of a much larger problem). Arguing that DevOps at least attacks one small aspect of the fundamental problem has some small merit, but it misses the point. If your organisation is broken by this silo mentality problem then DevOps is like a sticking plaster on a broken leg. [Added: Oh, the cruel irony. Having followed this link (provided in the slides mentioned above) I find much sympathy with the author of that piece (but then you'd expect that). And the author of the slide acknowledges that DevOps is nothing new (slides 42/43), and then sets about justifying DevOps by saying they 'actively seek cross-silo collaboration'. Seriously? If your employing, or training, people specifically to do that then you have a really big organisational cultural problem and DevOps is not going to solve it. Surely everyone in your organisation should be 'actively seek cross-silo collaboration' just as part of being a professional?]

Comment on DevOps; another ‘new’ thing that ain’t by John Allspaw

John Allspaw — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 14:16:56 +0000

To say that the idea of collaboration/cooperation between infrastructure groups and programmer groups isn’t new, isn’t new.

The term came from practitioners, not HR people, who *did* encounter frustrating environments and cultures (such as the concept of the BOFH, for example) and worked to bridge those gaps. Just because you don’t share that experience doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable for others who have.

As engineers, it’s expected that we get frustrated with terms that can mean different things in different contexts. If it helps, just replace “DevOps” with these words: “collaboration and communication between development and operations that supports the business”

‘DevOps’ is a little like knowing the difference between erotic art, and porn. You’ll know it when you see it.

Maybe this can help: http://www.slideshare.net/jedi4ever/devopsdays-downundervfinal

Cheers.

Comment on Why you’re wrong… by Peter

Peter — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 11:34:31 +0000

Amen to that sir! IMHO if one were to adopt the ‘Bob theory’ then you would be adding another functional silo to a landscape already littered with same. The objective of Configuration Management is to pool these silos into a cohesive whole that manages the complexities of end- to – end IT service delivery – at the sharp end, the bit that affects delivery in the face of the end user.

Comment on Don’t share your code! by Mark Bools

Mark Bools — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:46:37 +0000

Thanks Julian. I would agree with your basic assessment, but I would say the fundamental point is that you should look on these libraries as releasable entities in their own right (so your identifying them as open source projects is not a million miles away from my own conception). Just as when you use an open source project you do not typically integrate the code itself into your own (you use the products of the open source project; JARs, DLLs, etc.) so with your own common code you should not integrate the source but instead treat it as a separate product.

Comment on Don’t share your code! by Julian Simpson

Julian Simpson — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:13:17 +0000

Nice post. I’ve decided that you can think of this kind of project like an open source project. If it wouldn’t make a good open source tool, it’s probably not that useful in your enterprise.

Comment on Items have history by Damon Jebb

Damon Jebb — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 12:43:36 +0000

Hi Mark,

Of course, I had assumed that the file in the example was involved in the fix for the defect. But, of course, you’re right in that any other item in the baseline that is not involved in the changes made for a new release is passing through dev and test (even release) multiple times.

Damon