Changing my focus

change, infrastructure, devops

For those that know me, you know that I am very passionate about infrastructure and DevOps. Infrastructure is something that we, as developers, don’t really give a lot of thought to. DevOps is something that will make our businesses more successful. So, I am changing the job role that I have.

From now, I am no longer focusing on writing application code. Instead I am going to spend my time focusing on the following areas:

  • Be the facilitator to help our engineering team be much better by creating a DevOps culture
  • Writing code to control our infrastructure
  • Learning about the weird and wonderful ways of operations

DevOps is very important to me. When a company has a great culture, things get done. Operations work is smooth, software delivery is smooth and the teams are truly focused on achieving the goals of the business. Without a DevOps culture, things are not as smooth as they could be. In order to allow our developers to more faster, we will be building better systems (e.g. provisioning, configuration management, monitoring, logging etc.) to allow them to really achieve ‘situational awareness’

I heard the term ‘situational awareness’ just over a year ago. It was defined as ‘knowing what is going on around you’. Putting this into context, do you know what is going on with your applications in production? I certainly didn’t. This is essential to understand how your software is performing. I will be trying to help our engineers to try and solve this issue by helping them build better infrastructure management systems.

Operations is something that I know very little about. By exposing myself to this world, I feel it will help me understand the continual frustrations that operations and development staff have towards each other.

As you can see, I am truly trying to be a DevOps advocate. I want to be the person that helps the teams talk to each other and help each other rather than (traditionally) having silos. I will still be trying to talk at developer events / conferences. I feel that I can really help developers understand more about DevOps and how it can be successful.

This is a very exciting change for me! Let’s see how it goes….