The last two days I was swallowed up by my employer... Well, I decided to go to this conference about DevOps while my work continued as well, hence needed to execute on the 'usual' work for my customers in the evening, night and early mornings.

Some (or more) of you may say: DevOps? What is that?

Lets view what Webopedia (source) has to say about this:

DevOps (development and operations) is an enterprise software development phrase used to mean a type of agile relationship between development and IT operations. The goal of DevOps is to change and improve the relationship by advocating better communication and collaboration between these two business units.

In essence DevOps means to develop valuable services by IT in which valuable can be anything from users becoming happy, to increase of revenue.

DevOps is a kinda buzzword in my opinion. It is something that is in essence adopted for a long time already. Mostly put into practise in one or the other way by small startup companies, and other lean and mean (small) companies. Those companies in which the CTO has written the code and changes this whenever this is needed, eg when the service requires it eg when crashing in the middle of the night.

However, bigger and biggest companies, institutions and governments are far from having a DevOps environment. Since these are typically organisations that are having difficulties to change. Result: more and more DevOps events are held, more and more DevOps consulting companies emerge, more and more "yes, but" statements are made.

I believe that reality is that DevOps works in small companies. In larger to large and super large organisations, DevOps is very difficult to be implemented in such a way it actually benefit the organisation itself. It also requires a quite a different skill-set for engineers, and I wonder how many of the engineers of today can and want to work in a DevOps/Agile environment. Coming years, maybe even decades we will see where this is heading to.

Anyways!

Yesterday was a workshop day: after 3 hours of corporate culture, a kinda monopoly based development decision game and a high demanding customer use case game, I thought: "All nice but what the f*ck did I learn today?"

This morning, after a few hours of sleep, emails and several phone calls, I decided to give day 2 a try, hoping this was not a wrong decision.

...Boy oh Boy... It turned out to be a fantastic decision!

_{my signed copy}

Several very interesting speakers of which I want to mention specifically the closing keynote speaker: Mark Schwartz, author of the book "War Peace IT" and technology evangelist at AWS. Former CIO at one of the departments of US Homeland Security had to deal with a tremendous amount of rules and regulations to change and develop services to support the US immigration services. Lead-times of more than 18 months to implement new features, 104 documents to write to get such features be ok-ed by all involved and more of the corporate BS, he had to deal with. And then: He decided it shall be done differently in the future and decided that the next IT project would be pitched to all people involved on 4 powerpoint slides. Obviously, everybody resisted... until the moment Mark said:

"Why don't we call this a Pilot?" ...it turned out to be the Magic Word!

The message I took away from his speech is: Be creative when trying to drive new ideas into established teams, companies and organisations.

ps This guy is all about happiness, for sure! His answer to my question: Did DevOps pushed you up on the happiness scale, was: "absolutely!" Great smile while he was talking. And definitely a GREAT storyteller. His books must be a great read as well!

About his book "War, Peace IT", Mark stated: "I started to write where Tolstoy stopped his book". When Napoleon would've known how to implement agile way of warfare, the battle at the gates of Moscow would've had a totally different outcome.

NJOY TODAY

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