Arrested DevOps

Retro Trevor completed another revolution around the sun. Got Chromecasts for some family members. He was really impressed with how easily it interfaced with their other devices. Matt celebrated the holidays and got a lot of Doctor Who stuff, including a new Sonic Screwdriver that his 4 year old sons are obsessed with. He also got the first part of his new tattoo done. And lots of PowerShell, cloud, and DevOps. Outline/Questions David discovers that his particular model of servers in his home lab are suspect to the NSA “DEITYBOUNCE” exploit. Discuss why is it necessary to learn/know the “low level” things - does a developer really need to know how to write a bubble sort? Do devs need to understand RAID? Dan is reading a book called Code  which is relevant to this topic. Dan believes technology people should always be on a “quest” to want to be better, to need to be better. Matt: “There’s more to developing an application than writing the procedural code.” Matt quotes John Vincent’s blog post  AGAIN about what DevOps means. Lots of discussion about special snowflakes without giving proper attributions to Sascha Bates. DevOps is not a role, it’s a culture. Dan wonders about the Tech Ops equivalent of CodeAcademy. Matt vaguely remembers something like this. He might be thinking about Ops School. Matt offers a challenge to any developers in the audience - in your next standup, grab a task from the board that is not a traditionally “dev” task. Let us know how this works when you try it! DevOps Resolutions for 2014 David - To think about DevOps when Matt is not in the room. Just to keep fresh. Matt - To write some code for something that does some sh*t. And have David deploy it. Dan - To not be a #newb in Ops Trevor -  To be more present in his mind when it comes to doing Ops-type things. Check-Outs Matt 6 Year Old Drumming Prodigy Shreds Welcome To The Jungle By Guns N Roses Chocolatey Boxstarter Trevor The Captain Kirk Problem: How Doctor Who Betrayed Matt Smith A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Game of Thrones Companion Cookbook David The book Clean Code by Robert C. Martin Dan Free/cheap Kindle e-books for dev and ops books (sort the Kindle store from low to high)

Things get off to a great start during the retro, where Trevor complains about destroying his USB 3.0 drivers due to a Win 8.1 upgrade and Matt turns into a Cylon. Test Kitchen is now officially 1.0, but does’t really support Windows, but that doesn’t stop Matt from wanting to hack it to make it work anyway. “Testing is any action taken to give you information about the actual state of your software, vs your assumptions” – Lanette “A lot of developers look at testing like insurance – it’s not going to prevent a disaster, but it’s going to help you mitigate those problems” – John Spirited discussion about the value of code coverage as a metric, and our panelists mostly violenly agree that it is not a valuable number in a vacuum. We also discuss that it is possible to approach all of life like a QA tester. Jing Runscope Check-Outs Lanette Butler Wars – Jenkins vs Hudson Words with Friends @lanettecream Nate Jeepform Perfecto Mobile John Carcassonne for iOS Briefmetrics HookFeed Matt Pester – BDD framework for PowerShell XCOM – Enemy Within Trevor Clumsy Ticket to Ride Civilization V

Join thought leader John Vincent, along with podcast contributors Matt and Trevor, as they untangle the complexities of DevOps. They dive into the crucial need for collaboration between developers and operations, dispelling common misconceptions. The trio humorously discusses workplace culture, the challenges of open office layouts, and the vital role trust plays in tech teams. Their light-hearted banter includes personal recommendations for books and whiskey, making the discussion both insightful and entertaining!