What advice has had the greatest impact on your career at DevOps

I like to study various aspects of open-source projects, especially when they gain popularity in the field of DevOps. Projects that are referred to as “DevOps technologies” can be scalable collaboration systems that solve a wide range of problems – from message passing methods to monitoring. There is always something new that can be explored, installed, untwisted and explored.

However, DevOps cannot exist without principles. Some of these concepts are obvious truths that took some time to adopt. In turn, there are other ideas that help us recognize and go beyond our cognitive bias.

Although, strictly speaking, it does not apply to DevOps, one of the principles that changed everything for me is Kanban. The simple idea that work should be transparent and optimized was radical for a chronically multi-tasking person like me. I maintain the visibility of work processes to this day. The opportunity not to get lost in tasks was a huge relief for me. In addition, I no longer rejoice in intermediate successes: now I rejoice in accomplished tasks.

To find out what affected my colleagues, I asked DevOps Team Members OpenSource.com share your thoughts on this subject:

Which DevOps concept (practice, principle, or model) has changed your career?

Alex Bunardzic

Make mistakes faster, make mistakes as soon as possible, make mistakes as often as you can. Before I delved into this amazing concept, I fought in vain and worked in a standard waterfall model. My career consisted of a number of unsuccessful projects, and they all started with the thesis “Failures are unacceptable!” This is an extremely tedious model that reduces work efficiency and leads to the fact that from one disappointment to another you have to move on to another.

Realizing a flurry of quick and violent failures is the best thing that has happened in my career. Frustration gave way to a sense of flight. This has led to mass adoption / implementation of practices. TDD [test-driven development – разработка на основе тестирования] and to the realization that TDD is not a “test”, and “DRIVING”!

Katherine Louis

Cultural hacking. I had no idea that there was a name for the method that I (as partisans) used to change the corporate culture, but then I saw Seba Pak video “Ignite Montreal” and was glad that not only me was doing this.

Clement Verne

Continuous improvement. Until I was introduced to the ideas of continuous improvement, I did not look for development paths either in my work or in my career. Continuous improvement has made me realize that it depends on me. I realized that I could challenge myself by learning something new and getting out of my comfort zone. This led me to start contributing to an open source project (Fedora), and then started working on Red Hat. It definitely changed my career.

Jason hibbets

It all started with “The Lean Startup” on my first Code for America Summit. I clearly remember the turning point in my career in 2012. Eric Rhys, the author of The Lean Startup and a member of the Code for America board of directors, was on stage with Tim O’Reilly. They talked about breaking the code, as well as culture and testing failures. My biggest achievement was Acquaintance with “The Lean Startup.” I downloaded the book and read most of it during the flight home. It changed my approach to work and to managing the team.

The biggest change I made was implementation of feedback loops. This critically influenced the style of work and my team. I have shifted my team’s habits toward making data-driven decisions. We began to exchange information and ideas as part of feedback cycles. We also hold weekly meetings to check our health and constantly study our work processes and hypotheses. In addition, we experiment with new ideas and evaluate these experiments. We hold meetings for at the beginning of work on a task in the process of working on it and after its completion – this allows us to understand what to do next and what not, so that we can move on.

Willie Peter Schaub

During a two-month academic leave in 2018, it dawned on me that the fear of failure takes away my energy and passion for software development, and I loved this career. I realized that mistakes are not a tragedy, but a tool for innovation, collaboration and lifelong learning, which fuels DevOps. And this awareness has become a key moment in my career. Transparency of cooperation, progressive impact, development based on hypotheses and tests, as well as CD methods – all these practices create opportunities to achieve failure as soon as possible, conduct checks and adapt the solutions we are working on (and our career).

Your turn

DevOps can teach you a lot, even if you never open a terminal or any program. So I ask you the same question:

Which DevOps concept has had the greatest impact on your career?

Please share your thoughts in the comments.