Velocity defeats itself. Get acceleration instead
what a spherical cow can teach us about task prioritization in software teams
DevOps
Why we use kubernetes
There once was a little app, proudly running in a container. The container let the app have its favorite operating system and libraries, all snug and separate. The little app shared a container runtime with its friend, a firefly. Sometimes the app’s code would crash (through no fault of the code, of course; must have …
Run the OpenTelemetry Collector in Kubernetes for Front-End Tracing
TL;DR: Run the OpenTelemetry Collector helm chart with –values=values.yaml pointing to the values.yaml in this gist. Use kubectl get services to find the collector’s URL. The rest of this blog post walks through the whole process of setting this up. This will teach you the why and how of each step, so that you can adjust it to your needs. There’s also …
Read moreRun the OpenTelemetry Collector in Kubernetes for Front-End Tracing
Five Measurements You Should Make and Then Ignore (Plus One to Watch Intently)
Are we succeeding as a software team?Well, if our job were feature delivery, we could look at the parade of JIRA tickets in our “complete” column. That is only part of our job, though.The purpose of a software team is to provide valued capabilities to customers, internal or external. To do that, our software has …
Read moreFive Measurements You Should Make and Then Ignore (Plus One to Watch Intently)
Three Easy Ways to Use Distributed Traces
What is happening in production? Distributed tracing can help you find out. But it’s one thing to instrument, another to use it. Here’s a short (6m) video that asks “Why is this so slow?” See three quick ways to get answers in Honeycomb. If you want to follow along and play with the same data …
When costs are nonlinear, keep it small.
Batching work is more efficient … until cost rises nonlinearly with batch size. Then smaller batches are the most efficient. So don’t delay maintenance!
To grow, yet not to control
Giving birth and nourishing,making without possessing,expecting nothing in return.To grow, yet not to control:This is the mysterious virtue. Lau Tzu, Tao Te Ching Can we make software, and care for it in productionwithout feeling possessive of our code? The software gives us nothing back. It could emit events for us. If we listen to its …
Principles of Collaborative Automation
Principles of Collaborative Automation How can we make our tools work with our team? Like a good team member, great tools keep us informed, implement our decisions, and help us understand errors.Drawing from aviation, medicine, and software, here are strategies for choosing and building tools that enhance us and do not frustrate us. abstract Great …
skills v. practices
When helping software development teams work more smoothly, we want to teach them TDD, DevOps, pairing, clean code, etc. Which of these are skills, and which are practices? Yes — they’re all both. Skills and practices aren’t separate; they’re a circle. Knowing how to do something gives you the option to practice it, which makes …
Definition of DevOps
Step 1: On one team, put the people with the knowledge and control necessary to change the software, see the results, change it, see the results. Step 2: Use automation to take extrinsic cognitive load off this team, so that it needs fewer people. That’s it, that’s DevOps. Step 1 describes the cultural change that …