DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018: Conference Review

Originally written for and posted at blogs@liatrio

DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018 took place in Las Vegas from October 22-24, and @teamliatrio had a great time bringing our largest number of consultants ever. The week was super productive and fun, especially since we coupled the conference with a consulting team offsite meeting. The move of the conference to Las Vegas originally had us a bit skeptical. However, the strength of the community and the quality of the speakers quickly won us over, furthering our belief that DevOps practitioners and evangelists are cut from the same cloth and are passionate about doing DevOps right.

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Hidden realities that create Enterprise Delivery problems

Originally written for and posted at blogs@liatrio

Enterprises look like very busy places. There is a lot of activity – massive programs and projects, long off-sites, strategy sessions, big investment portfolios, a whole lot of people, and a whole lot of action. But is work really getting done? If so, is it getting done the right way and with the right direction and momentum with a flow of ideas from implementation to delivery to customer satisfaction? And is there a culture of continuous learning, along with fast feedback and the optimization and use of that feedback?

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DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 Planning

Vegas Here We Come!

Originally written for and posted at blogs@liatrio

The DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) 2018 is about 5 days away. We at Liatrio have been doing a lot of DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 planning, and we’re getting ready to show up in full force with our consultants who lead our clients on their DevOps Transformation journeys. Members of our team have attended every U.S.-based DOES, this year and 10 members of our team are going!

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Game of Flow - Agile vis-a-vis Waterfall

Software Delivery is hard! Very hard.

Inherently, compared to writing software, delivery should be technically simple and needing less intelligence but thanks to the cumbersome, large, bureaucratic & silo’d enterprises; technical work has often become the easiest and the cheapest part - managing managers - has become the expensive part.

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DevOps Service Delivery Quadrant

In the DevOps philosophy, one critical item to focus on is the co-relation of a software delivery functions that need to be performed to the tools that are being used. Tools are nothing but a constrained codification of a process so the actual tooling is always secondary to the function that needs to be satisfied. So as long as a function is satisfied when it comes to delivery (like code analysis or monitoring); what tool you use or do not, really does not matter.

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Decoding Toyota DNA

A fascinating read that really explains how a culture of continuous improvement embodies the Toyota manufacturing system and how generations after generations of workers are trained constantly to solve problems at their level by using tools in the form of countermeasures, problem-solving as a way to keep getting better and coaching by asking questions to enforce the idea of empowerment.

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11 things from Hubspot Culture Code

HubSpot Culture Code:

  • Culture is to recruiting as a product is to marketing.
  • Whether you like it or not, you’re going to have a culture. Why not make it one you love?
  • Solve For The Customer — not just their happiness, but also their success.
  • Power is now gained by sharing knowledge, not hoarding it.
  • “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
  • You shouldn’t penalize the many for the mistakes of the few.
  • Results should matter more than when or where they are produced.
  • Influence should be independent of hierarchy.
  • Great people want direction on where they’re going — not directions on how to get there.
  • “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”
  • We’d rather be failing frequently than never trying.

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Velocity Conference - 2013

Was at Velocity conference @ Santa Clara last week was an absolute blast! Had a chance to attend all three days of the conference with a few of my colleagues from work and along with the Atlassian conference, this has to be one of the best out there. The speaker list had a good mix of some really good technical topics but mostly, the conversation centred around how fast technology is changing and how culture needs to change to ensure that we keep going in the right direction.

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Stuff I am tinkering with!

Stuff I am working with these days.

  • Ruby on Rails
  • jQuery
  • backbone.js
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • Heroku
  • Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, SQS, RDS)
  • Facebook API
  • Continuous Integration & Delivery
  • Devops (Extension of work to home)
  • Technical writing (Extension from work to home)

Something I have learnt along the way: Having work that is not focussed on engineering with latest technologies definitely holds you back. But having work that you are passionate about and good at vs. coming home to work on stuff that interests you is definitely rewarding. You learn a lot about yourself.

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Slicehost - Startup Full Circle

What you hear mostly is the innovative idea, the superstar angels and VC’s, the mind-boggling valuations for yet-another-cloud-storage service. What you see are slick presentations, awesome websites and very technical blogs. What we see are the initial phases when the industry is betting on your success. What is don’t see is the full circle.

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Blue Ocean Strategy

Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne, a teacher-student duo, write this fascinating management book that looks at industry disrupters that went after uncontested market spaces (blue oceans) rather than fighting with competitors (red oceans) to gain market share.

The thing about how Callaway Golf invented the big-head golf clubs to make it easier for normal people to enjoy golf while its competitors manufactured the same tiny head clubs that made the game so challenging for the general populace.Examples like this and many more that will get you thinking about how to change market assumptions and legacy practices.

Moreover, its a really fun read!

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Competing for the Future

The Late CK Prahalad & Gary Hamels masterpiece from the 90’s is still a force to reckon with in the management space for a lot of industries especially technology when it comes to finding unique opportunities for growth. Today’s latest innovations seem right out of the pages of this book written a quarter of a century ago when take talk about cloud computing and smart phones becoming virtual necessities for fast-growing markets and how companies should align to use them for their advantage.

The books slashes the argument of dealing with downsizing and lay-off’s to retain profitability and asks probing questions on why successful companies become giant tortoises even with all the wealth and power while small nimble firms run away with the pie!

A must read for business managers looking to avoid making colossal blunders.

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Enterprise Architecture as a Strategy

As the title suggests, the book is a comprehensive read on how integration across the enterprise can really lead to a strategic growth model that will lead to very tailored solutions at a micro level but maintaining robust consistency at the macro level.

A must read if you want to understand pertinent model’s on how line managers can adapt to changing trends and localized demands while executives maintain control over the trajectory of the company based on industry trends and customer preferences.

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