Intro

(03:59) Brought to you by Swimm.io.

⁠⁠⁠⁠Start modernizing your mainframe faster with Swimm.
Understand the what, why, and how of your mainframe code.
Use AI to uncover critical code insights for seamless migration, refactoring, or system replacement.

Stop fearing Friday and late-night deployments!
Discover how the most painful part of software development—deploying to production—can become routine, safe, and even boring.

In this episode, I sit down with Valentina Servile (ThoughtWorks lead developer and author of “Continuous Deployment”) to discuss the principles, practices, and mindset shift required to achieve true Continuous Deployment.

Key topics discussed:

• The key differences between Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment
• Why “if it hurts, do it more often” is the secret to safer, faster releases
• Applying Lean principles like one-piece flow and reducing batch size for higher quality and speed
• The importance of removing the final manual deployment gate and automating everything
• Essential minimum practices: robust automated testing, feature flags, static analysis, and zero-downtime deployments
• Separating deployment from release with feature flags and expand/contract patterns
• Overcoming challenges in regulated industries, technical hurdles, and third-party integrations
• The critical mindset shift: treating production as a first-class citizen and embracing “shift left” for quality and security
• Cautions and advice on using AI tools in a continuous deployment workflow

Tune in to level up your software delivery and learn how to make deployments so routine that you’ll never dread another release.  

Timestamps:

• (02:00) Career Turning Points
• (06:05) Tips for Juniors Starting Their Careers
• (08:00) Continuous Deployment Book
• (10:16) Definitions of CI, CD, Continuous Deployment
• (15:42) If It Hurts, Do It More Often
• (19:18) Why Remove The Final Manual Gate to Production
• (24:56) Common Challenges in Adopting Continuous Deployment
• (30:02) Minimum Practices for Continuous Deployment
• (35:17) Hiding Work-in-Progress
• (38:46) The Difference Between Deployment vs Release
• (41:40) Slicing the Work
• (45:10) Coordinating Changes Between Systems & Third Parties
• (47:58) The Importance of Backward Compatibility
• (50:05) The Required Mindset Shift
• (53:16) AI Caution in Continuous Deployment
• (55:35) 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

_____

Valentina Servile’s Bio
Valentina Servile is a full-stack software craftswoman and Lead Software Developer at Thoughtworks.

She has worked with over a dozen companies in 5 different countries, ranging from start-up to enterprise scale. Her work has been focused on clean code, distributed systems and microservices, CI/CD practices, and evolutionary architectures in a variety of tech stacks. As a technical lead, she also coordinates delivery, and ensures a shared vision around ways of working and technical health in her cross-functional teams.

Valentina is passionate about creating an engineering baseline of clean code, testing and automation as the the most fundamental enabler of Agile, Lean and DevOps principles.

Follow Valentina:

• LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/valentina-servile
• Bluesky – @valentinaservile.bsky.social
• 📚 Continuous Deployment – https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/continuous-deployment/9781098146719/

Our Sponsors

Manning Publications is a premier publisher of technical books on computer and software development topics for both experienced developers and new learners alike. Manning prides itself on being independently owned and operated, and for paving the way for innovative initiatives, such as early access book content and protection-free PDF formats that are now industry standard.

Get a 40% discount for Tech Lead Journal listeners by using the code techlead24 for all products in all formats.

Like this episode?
Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/214.
Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
Buy me a coffee or become a patron.