I talk to Jonathan Hall about all things DevOps from small companies to large companies and where the customer fits in the often technical story of our code development and deployment.
How do you bring junior devs up to speed responsibly? How do we as an industry think of DevOps tooling and how much is too much? How and when should you automate?
We also talk about his love for Golang and how it makes life simpler for junior and senior devs alike - how he got into DevOps and what that means to him both from a development and operations perspective.
Finally we also cover Continuous Delivery and how to implement more easily, in reverse.
NOTES
Tiny DevOps Podcast: https://jhall.io/tinydevops/
Cup o' Go Podcast: https://cupogo.dev/
Adventures in DevOps Podcast: https://topenddevs.com/podcasts/adventures-in-devops
Boldy Go Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC79XhRzbR3YSnm3ODqgZ6EQ
Best Book to Learn Go: https://boldlygo.tech/posts/2023-02-24-best-book-to-learn-go-in-2023/
Three Ways of DevOps: https://itrevolution.com/articles/the-three-ways-principles-underpinning-devops/
QUOTES
[02:41] "it was shortly after I joined that company that we had a Black Friday incident." [JH]
[03:02] "It turns out the problem was an execute bit had not been set on a little shell script." [JH]
[03:27] "how do we, how do we live a sane life. In a world where those mistakes are bound to happen" [JH]
[04:31] "any person who comes to realization, um, about themselves vis-a-vis software realizes that you have to limit mistakes as much as possible" [RB]
[05:45] "I was frequently frustrated by the, uh, The lack of streamlining they had around deployments" [JH]
[07:21] " So that's kind of how I realized. Tiny, in the sense of like small headcount, small teams is kind of where I wanted to focus." [JH]
[07:49] " if you're employee number 10, You have, you know, in theory, a 10% influence on how things are done. If you're employee number 1000, you have a 0.1% influence on how things are done. It's just a big difference that way." [JH]
[09:26] "I often say that the hardest part of our job isn't the technology, it's the people." [JH]
[11:24] "infinity sign with the different steps is one or the three ways of DevOps, and the customer doesn't really take a center seat in any of those, which is unfortunate." [JH]
[12:25] "one of the common things I see is people automating stuff before they even know what it's supposed to be doing" [JH]
[14:09] " I think that there's a natural human tendency to seek the easy answers." [JH]
[15:02] "The unfortunate truth is that life isn't that simple. Life isn't as simple." [JH]
[16:45] "since I tend to work more often with smaller, younger companies, one common piece of advice I often give them is to hire one senior instead of two juniors" [JH]
[17:33] "how many junior developers have you worked with who understood how Git works? That's an essential skill that is not being taught properly." [JH]
[18:19] "the less code you have, the safer your company is in the long run, the less expensive developers you need to maintain that code" [JH]
[18:55] "all these sorts of things you kind of pick up on the job, but that's 80% of the job really" [JH]
[20:54] "Dockers written and go" [JH]
[21:17] "So there's like 10 or 12 different ways to do loops in Pearl and go you have one and only one." [JH]
[26:15] "I've been making sort of an effort of educating people on the idea of implementing continuous delivery in reverse" [JH]
[27:29] "The problem with that approach is that nobody ever gets there, or almost nobody ever gets there." [JH]
[28:00] "Every time you push to either to master or to your staging branch or whatever you have there, get that automatic build and deploy working. Then after you have that in place, Start working backwards" [JH]
[29:27] "This makes the bottleneck more obvious. It makes the changes safer. It does introduce pain, but that pain can be a good thing if you use it to drive the right change." [JH]
[30:19] "Ask the question of Why can't you do that yet? Don't just stop there. " [JH]
[31:47] "10 years ago, it was, it was almost blasphemous to say that you could do 10 deploys in a day" [JH]
[32:11] " I'm encouraged by the, the way the conversation has changed over the last 10, 15 years." [JH]
