Code Comments

Establishing consistent automation habits helps keep those skills sharp and gets the systems set up promptly. But getting to that point takes time. And even when automating processes becomes second nature, you can still overlook potential pitfalls. Joshua Bradley of Cox Edge describes what it’s like managing the expectations teams and stakeholders may have about automating infrastructure. The systems may be more complex. Timelines may be longer. And even when you leave detailed instructions, users may still make mistakes. It just means you need to keep adjusting until you get it right.

Making automation work takes more than just writing the scripts. And it’s most effective when it becomes a habit rather than a one-off project. But building habits and changing culture is no easy task. Eduardo Krumholz and David Linthicum of Deloitte help their clients internalize automation as part of their workflows. They share their strategies to help their customers make that transition successful—and overcome reluctance to change.

World Wide Technology (WWT) helps organizations set up their tech infrastructure. But they also have to do it for themselves. It’s a lot to juggle with their ambitious goals for growth. Automation is helping them get to where they want to go—but it took them a few years to find a solution the team bought into.  Corey Wanless and Jason Kayser share what WWT wanted to achieve with automation, the challenges they faced, and how it helped the people of WWT come together.

Automation is a game-changer. It promises to decrease time to deploy, reduce errors, and increase reliability and efficiency. But you can’t automate change. What does it take for teams to actually reach that finish line? And how does it affect how they actually work? Season 2 of Code Comments goes beyond the sales pitch and features teams who’ve tackled automation. Because there’s no script for adjusting to automation.

The idea behind extended reality, or XR, is immersion. That can be a hard standard to meet when dealing with a visual interface. As an intern at NVIDIA, Hayden Wolff stepped up to tackle a thorny challenge, and with some assistance from natural language processing (NLP), the company’s Project Mellon is changing the way we look at the design process.

Connecting tools and systems yields all sorts of benefits. What can be tricky is knowing exactly what those benefits are - especially emergent ones. Neesha Godbole, a Partner Account Manager with MuleSoft, shares how mapping the benefits of joint projects is about finding more than the sum of the parts. But it doesn’t make a difference if you can’t communicate the value to customers.

Change may seem exciting for some. But for those who are moving from one platform, or one technology, to the next, it can be a daunting, anxiety-filled experience. For Dynatrace’s Markie Duby, keeping empathy at the center of one’s work is crucial for building trust and for collaborating with customers as they adapt to an industry that never stops moving.

When it comes time to move to the cloud, the concerns can be many. Companies are increasingly security conscious, and success depends on applications being reliable. There’s also the need for agility, to adjust to changes in the market. F5’s Matt Quill tells Burr how planning carefully and collaboratively can address challenges while building pivotal internal relationships.

Ever been so frustrated with the options available that you build your own? Ben Darnell, Chief Architect and Co-Founder of Cockroach Labs, shares how his dissatisfaction with distributed databases led to the creation of CockroachDB. To build a distributed database that not only plans for but expects failures, they needed to implement the Raft consensus algorithm. Getting it up and running was a tough technical challenge. But the result was an incredibly resilient database.Find out why Netflix uses CockroachDB for their databases. Can you have access to a globally available database at the speed of a regional one? Check out how Cockroach Labs accomplishes this with global tables.  

It’s one thing to talk about your open source principles. It’s another entirely to build them into your workflows. How does a large company like Amazon Web Services actually make it work? David Duncan, Sr Manager Partner Solutions Architect at AWS, explains that being open with partners and customers throughout the development process is key. He talks about ensuring there are no one-way doors, and how collaboration helps to produce a better experience for OpenShift on AWS as well as combining the power of the Cloud Control API with Ansible automation.