DevOps: A culture where people, regardless of title or background, work together to imagine, develop, deploy and operate a system.

Continue reading “My Definition of DevOps” →

We just wrapped up DevOpsDays Seattle. It was awesome. We had a bunch of truly engaging and informative talks. We also had one talk that really pissed me off.

I want to be clear here… I’m not upset with the speaker, or the content of the talk. I’m upset with the idiots who made the talk necessary.

Continue reading “Stop making conferences shitty for other people” →

For those of us that have implemented Continuous Delivery and moved to (or solidified) working in a sharing culture (DevOps), many of the concepts are old hat. We’re all very excited to learn about the latest way to manage thousands of docker containers running in multiple data centers. We talk about monitoring systems that allow us to make fine grained business decisions based on very small, but very important, pieces of data.

Meanwhile, hardly anyone knows what Continuous Delivery is. Continue reading “Why I’m Talking More About Beginner Stuff” →

Another organization launched today offering DevOps certifications. We’ll skip the fact that DevOps is supposed to be about culture (something pretty hard to quantify, let alone certify) and focus on the “certification” part. Continue reading “Certifications Suck” →

This article was originally posted on the GoCD blog.

Years ago, when I was in management, I had a favorite rule. If asked “is something done?” the answer could not include the word “except” or any of its synonyms.

“It’s done except for…” = “no”.

Continue reading “It’s Not Done Unless it’s Done” →

I’m totally guilty of using the term “guys” on a fairly regular basis, even when giving talks in public. It’s very close to my “um”.

I want to stop. I really do. So, I’m giving myself an incentive.

I’ll donate $5 to Black Girls Code for every time I use the term “guys” in a public talk. Yes, I’m starting only with public talks so I can still pay the mortgage.

Rules:

• Please don’t interrupt an actual talk, let me know afterwards
• This only applies to talks in the future, no fair going back in time to youtube
• It’s $5 per usage, not $5 per person who catches me (again, gotta pay the mortgage)

Do you use the word “guys” when talking to groups of people? Join me!