Author Archives: Ernest Mueller

About Ernest Mueller

Ernest is the VP of Engineering at the cloud and DevOps consulting firm Nextira in Austin, TX. More...
by | May 9, 2023 · 8:01 pm

Career Tip – Managing Up

“What is my manager’s deal, anyway?”

Here’s some career advice that can help you build a more effective relationship with your manager. Remember, they may be a manager but they don’t know everything, or everything that you do, and they are navigating work and life with just as much trepidation as you are! If you haven’t been a manager, it’s sometimes hard to understand why they’re doing what they are and how to best work with them to make both of you happy. So you want to figure out how to “hack” your manager by managing up!

For many years I treated my managers as random-weird-request generators, and frequently worked at cross-purposes with them. until I got advice on managing up and it helped my career.

Managing up, or managing your manager, is an important skill that can contribute to a more productive and positive work environment. Here are some key pieces of advice to effectively manage up:

  1. Understand your manager’s priorities and expectations: Take the time to understand your manager’s goals, preferred communication style, and expectations. Ask them if it’s not obvious! This knowledge will help you align your work and approach accordingly, or at least find a happy medium. (Feel free and tell them the same about you!) Managers usually have a very specific reason for why they’re asking for something and why they are stressing the things they’re stressing; understanding why is the key to understanding them.
  2. Build a strong relationship: Develop a positive and professional relationship with your manager. Be proactive in seeking feedback, understanding their working style, and demonstrating your commitment to achieving shared goals. Our managers try to share the context of what needs to happen with everyone so that they can go do it with autonomy, so reflecting your understanding of and commitment to what’s going on at a high level helps them empower you. If you can help them achieve their goals via a plan you put together, it prevents them needing to “micromanage” by also dictating how to get there.
  3. Communication is key: Maintain open and regular communication with your manager. Keep them informed about your progress, challenges, and any important updates. Be clear, concise, and respectful in your communication, and adapt your style to match your manager’s preferences – remember they have a bunch of people they are trying to wrangle to understand the state of a lot of projects.
  4. Anticipate needs and be proactive: Try to anticipate your manager’s needs and take proactive steps to address them. Take initiative, suggest solutions to problems, and offer assistance when appropriate. Show that you are capable of working independently and taking ownership of your responsibilities.
  5. Make clear asks: Your manager is there to get you what you need to do your job and be happy and healthy. But everyone is different. They don’t know how you prefer to get recognized, or what kind of projects you want to work on, or resources you think you need to be successful… So tell them! They should be trying to figure it out by asking you too, but “communication is hard” and people often make assumptions based on a given situation or communication that may or may not reflect your needs.
  6. Provide solutions, not just problems: When you encounter challenges or issues, avoid simply presenting the problems to your manager. Instead, propose potential solutions or alternatives. This demonstrates your critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and it lightens the burden on your manager by offering actionable suggestions. If you don’t have a good solution to a specific issue it’s fine, but sometimes a manager can become dismissive of someone who “just complains all the time” because it adds work to a limited time without any help.
  7. Seek and act on feedback: Actively seek feedback from your manager on your performance and areas for improvement. Be open to constructive criticism and use it to grow and develop professionally. Demonstrate your willingness to learn and make necessary adjustments based on the feedback received.
  8. Manage your time effectively: Prioritize your tasks, set clear goals, and manage your time efficiently. This will help you meet deadlines, deliver quality work, and reduce the need for constant supervision. Ask if priorities or timings aren’t clear. Your manager dearly wants everyone to be able to do their own thing without any intervention but is held responsible by upper management for outcomes and project schedules/profitability.
  9. Be a team player: Collaborate and foster positive relationships with your colleagues. Support your teammates, share knowledge, and contribute to a cooperative and harmonious work environment. Show that you can work well with others and contribute to the overall success of the team.

Managing up is not about manipulation or trying to control your manager. It’s about building a strong working relationship based on trust, effective communication, and mutual respect. By demonstrating your competence, reliability, and commitment, you can effectively manage up, have the trust and proactive support of your manager, and contribute to your professional growth and success.

(This article partially written by ChatGPT!)

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by | May 6, 2023 · 12:34 pm

The Value Of Gratefulness


I have been in technology management for more than 20 years now and have worked in a wide variety of shops, and I think I’ve identified a key element that creates a good leader, and that is gratefulness.

Gratefulness Empowers Recognition

Everyone knows that “employee recognition” is important for morale; any company cites it as a priority whether they are really doing it or not. Sometimes it just gets forgotten – but sometimes there’s excuses given not to do it, concerns that it “sounds artifical” or that “they get thanks in form of their salary” or “people will be uncomfortable or jealous.” And some people honestly have a hard time doing it.

I’ve found that those that cultivate an actual spirit of gratefulness within them for other peoples’ work, especially for those who work for you and the sweat of their brow contributes to your success and growth, have an easier time of it.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. The classic Dale Carnegie book How To Win Friends and Influence People is often categorized as a “sales book.” It’s not, it’s way more profound than that and deserves a place in any leader’s library. In its introduction there’s explicitly a story of a man with 314 employees who did nothing but criticize them, then studied the book’s principles, and subsequently turned around his management strategy so he had 314 friends and not 314 enemies, leading to both increased happiness and increased profitability. And Part 2 of the book quickly gets to the “how” – it starts with “Become genuinely interested in other people” and ends with “Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.”

I don’t think it’s a shocking revelation that gratefulness leads to better recognition and therefor to better morale, but what I want to get across here is that even if you’re not good at that out of the gate, it can be learned.

And once you learn it, you get more help from other people.

I personally grew up as a very introverted person who was happy alone and on the computer, and not being very interested in others. But in my early career I quickly saw that was holding me back. I wanted to change it so I read How To Win Friends and Influence People and tried to put it into action. Awkwarly and self-consciously at first, of course.

Then something strange started happening to me. People I didn’t know would turn and talk to me in the elevator! I was, frankly, shocked. Generally in my life up to that point, in public I left people alone and they left me alone. I came to the realization that even my demeanor had changed and was more open somehow, and it was causing people I didn’t even know and wasn’t intending to interact with to feel like they could interact with me. And not to hassle me, but to help me.

Ungratefulness Leads To Bad Decisions

For many years I thought that gratefulness was just something that made you friendlier and made recognition easier and so was good in the long term. But then I worked at a startup where the CEO had a deep, fundamental lack of gratefulness, and I saw how that leads to critically bad decisonmaking.

Because people, and people’s work, have value – not in some hug-filled hippie sense, but in a very tangible sense. At the company in question the CEO came to me several times wanting to fire an engineer who had legit written 80% of the working product code in the shop “because he doesn’t think architect level.” He ousted a co-founder who was the only person who had actually brought in sales for the company. So years later it was a startup that had trouble even creating a shipping product and certainly wasn’t growing revenue, and had – seriously estimating – about 300% employee turnover in its lifetime. He sabotaged his own company because he couldn’t look at even objective value creation (working code! shipping product! sales revenue!) and value those who generate it at all.

That really made me stop and think. The stereotype of the ungrateful leader is one that only values hard objective results and “is mean” to people otherwise, but my experience has led me to the conclusion that’s a false dichotomy – if you are unable to see value you’re going to be unable to see it whether it’s in a person or in github or on a ledger book. Especially in a sector where that value is being created by the skilled workers!

Instead, you want to train yourself to see value so that you can gather more of it and help it grow! It’s not just being a kind leader because that’s “in” this decade, gratefulness is actually a strength you can develop that helps you make effective decisions.

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by | April 28, 2023 · 2:34 pm

How To Learn DevOps?

Hey all! James and I are preparing to revise our LinkedIn Learning course, DevOps Foundations, a three hour set of videos designed to orient beginners in the whole scope of DevOps. 

We created the course in 2016 primarily because at the time there were no good introductions to DevOps. You needed to know what blogs to follow and what events to go to and that was it. Even the DevOps Handbook hadn’t come out yet. And this provided a very high barrier to entry to the field. And we believe in learning and collaboration so we knew what we had to do!

Since then, it’s been one of the top tech courses on LinkedIn Learning with over 400,000 learners so far and has generated a dozen other courses drilling down into detail in specific areas. The things that make it worth it to me is the people we run across who say “this helped me improve my career.” My favorite was one gentleman who pulled me aside at the Aqua Security booth at RSA back before the pandemic and said “Hey, I had just gotten out of the Army and was trying to get a good job, and so was looking at tech. Your course oriented me enough that I got a sales job here!” Being able to help people like that is a rare privilege and we really value it.

Please fill out our survey to let us know what you think are the key things someone needs to learn about DevOps – whether they have some existing dev or ops knowledge or are just getting into it!

Here’s the old table of contents for reference… A lot of this hasn’t changed, the basics are still the basics, but it has been 7 years and a lot has changed, some things to add, some things to change, some things to cut. Let us know your opinion!

  • DevOps Basics
    • What Is DevOps? – Understand the meaning of DevOps and why you might care about it.
    • DevOps Core Values: CAMS – Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing are the core values of DevOps.
    • DevOps Principles: The Three Ways – The Three Ways can guide your strategic approach to DevOps.
    • Your DevOps Playbook – There’s a developing list of patterns and methodologies that can help you transition to DevOps.
    • Ten Practices for DevOps Success: 10 through 6 – Tactical, pragmatic tips for DevOps success in your organization
    • Ten Practices for DevOps Success: 5 through 1 – Tactical, pragmatic tips for DevOps success in your organization
    • DevOps Tools – the Cart Or The Horse? – The role of tools in DevOps and tips for selecting and using tooling to achieve your end goal.
  • DevOps: A Culture Problem
    • The IT Crowd and the Coming Storm – Existing IT culture has both internal and external problems. Meanwhile, new challenges of scale and business cadence are pressing technology departments to change.
    • Use Your Words – Communication is the key to collaboration and solving problems when the stakes are high.
    • Do Unto Others – Build trust and respect and eliminate blame and hostility in your teams.
    • Throwing Things Over Walls – Break down the silos and establish a culture of responsibility and ownership, and align your teams to support the flow of concept to cash.
    • Kaizen: Continuous Improvement – Everything can be iterated upon to make it better – even yourself!
  • The Building Blocks of DevOps
    • DevOps Building Block: Agile – DevOps extends Agile principles to include deployment and operations.
    • DevOps Building Block: Lean – Understanding Lean can be the difference between a DevOps implementation that helps you achieve your company’s goals and one that’s just “the same but different.”
    • ITIL, ITSM, and the SDLC – Where does the “old school” fit in to a DevOps world?
  • Infrastructure Automation
    • Infrastructure As Code – Take a fundamentally different approach to building distributed systems whether in the datacenter or in the cloud.
    • Golden Image to Foil Ball – Learn about configuration mangement, automated provisioning, deployment and orchestration.
    • Immutable Deployment – With the rise of containers, different CM patterns are gaining currency.
    • Your Infrastructure Toolchain – Common tools in this space include Chef, Puppet, and Ansible but new container-based approaches like docker are on the rise. [Yes, this was before terraform and kubernetes, definitely places to update]
  • Continuous Delivery
    • Small + Fast = Better – Delivering small batches of change quickly reduces risk, improves quality, and restricts technical debt.
    • Continuous Integration Practices – Learn about Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment, which you need and how to get there.
    • The Continuous Delivery Pipeline
    • The Role Of QA – Move from manual testing to automated with Test Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior Driven Development (BDD).
    • Your CI Toolchain – From Github to Jenkins, your code pipeline consists of many different parts with specific functions.
  • Reliability Engineering
    • Engineering Doesn’t End With Deployment – If you build it, you run it and other patterns for reliability engineering.
    • Design For Operation – Theory – Building a system to be resilient is the highest leverage step in ensuring high uptime and low MTTR.
    • Design For Operation – Practice – Ops has learned hard lessons about resiliency over the years – take it into account when building your applications.
    • Operate For Design: Metrics and Monitoring – Operational support isn’t just keeping the systems up, it provides crucial feedback back into the development cycle. {Yes, the kids call this observability now]
    • Operate for Design: Logging
    • Your SRE Toolchain – Monitoring, troubleshooting, and metrics are a vital space in your tooling strategy.
  • Additional DevOps Resources
    • Unicorns, Horses, and Donkeys, Oh My – In an emerging discipline, going to events to learn from other expert practitioners is your fastest route to success.
    • Ten Best DevOps Books You Need to Read – There’s a growing number of books on DevOps, here’s our top 10 reading list.
    • Navigating The Series of Tubes – DevOps information on the Web is fragmented and hard to find sometimes; here’s some of the best places to watch.
  • The Future of DevOps
    • Cloud to Containers to Serverless – Profound changes to our computing model have arrived to challenge many of our established practices.
    • The Rugged Frontier of DevOps: Security – Security is changing and is rapidly uptaking the DevOps movement, we cover the major implications here. {Yes. the kids call this DevSecOps now]
  • Conclusion
    • Next Steps: Am I a DevOp now? – Learn what next steps you should pursue for growing in DevOps understanding and practice.

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by | April 26, 2023 · 9:34 am

DevOpsDays Austin 2023 Tips!

Well, the Agile Admins have handed the reins of DevOpsDays Austin off to a new generation! And DoDA 2023 is coming up next week! I’ll be there, participating rather than wrangling for once…

Shaun Mouton, one of the new core organizers, asked me to share an annotated overview of items which may be of interest to attendees! So read on, and hope to see you out at the conference.

Austin musical notes

for Visitors and Interested Parties

DevOpsDays Austin 2023 is coming up quite soon, and I thought I’d mention for the out-of-towners and folks who might want to know that there are some decent shows happening around the same time:

May 3rd: The Black Dahlia Murder w/Terror, etc at the Mohawk

  • Metalheads, trudge through some sludge. TBDM is here.

Daisy The Great at Antone’s

  • If twee indie pop heavy on harmony is your thing get your fill of Brooklyn’s darling sextet at Antone’s. Portland’s Olive Klug is playing too and this will probably be a really fun show.

The Drakes at Saxon Pub

  • The Drakes put on a tremendous rock n roll show at one of Austin’s classic venues.

Arc Angels at Gruene Hall

  • I can’t make this show and I’m bummed about it. You should go catch this Hill Country supergroup at one of Texas’ finest music venues.

Warren Hood at ABGB

  • I’ve heard good things about his shows but haven’t made it yet. Still, I feel pretty comfortable recommending this one.

Wednesdays with W.C. Clark at Pinballz Kingdom in Buda

  • The Godfather of Austin Blues lays it down. W.C.’s still got it and you can get it too.

Libby and the Loveless

  • Sam’s Town Point is a great place to hang out and see a show, and L&tL (nobody calls them that) will play a fine mix of country standards.

Michael Hale Organ Trio & Sketch at C-Boy’s Heart & Soul Bar

  • If you’re coming to Austin for the first time or haven’t been to C-Boy’s you might want to make this show. Great venue, great music.

Matt the Electrician & friends at The 04 Center

  • Matt’s fantastic, this is likely to be a great show, and the 04 is a good venue for them.

May 4th: Lil Wayne at Stubb’s

  • I might skip out on evening events if I can make this one. Sorry y’all, it’s Tha Carter.

Tennis at ACL Live at the Moody Theater

  • Tennis is a bit precious, but if you’re into it they’re a lot of fun. Dance it out at the Moody.

Barbara Nesbitt & Friends at The Continental Club Gallery

  • I’m getting a little annoyed writing these now, there’s so much to see. Nesbitt’s voice is a delightful slice of Americana.

Two Step Lessons

  • You’ve got good choices if you want to learn how to two-step on Thursday. Sam’s Town Point and the White Horse cater to newbies who want to learn how to put a little twang in their electric slide.

Large Brush Collection, Little Mazarn, Jenny Carson at Feels So Good

  • FSG started out as a differently named screenprinting shop and showed up at a few local tech conferences making shirts for attendees to-order. They’re chill people and put on a great series of shows at the shop.

Greg Koch at the 04 Center

  • Pretty sure Koch is going to tear the A-frame roof of the sucker. If you’re into groovy six-string acrobatics this will be a fun outing.

The Arc Angels with Madam Radar at Riverbend Centre

  • Again, probably going to have to miss this one For Reasons, but I’m not happy about it. Grab this chance to see some of our local greats burn the house down.

Manny Velazquez at the Little Longhorn Saloon

  • Manny V knows country music, puts on a good show, and Austin’s lucky to have him. Classic country sound at a fun little venue.

May 5th: The Blues Specialists at The Continental Club

  • The Blues Specialists have been holding down the Continental Club for ages with their Texas-style jump blues. If that sounds even a little like your jam, it’s absolutely your jam. Get you to the Continental, friend.

The Psychedelic Furs at ACL Live at the Moody Theater.

  • You a Furs fan? This would be a decent opportunity to catch them. The Moody Theater is a fine place to see a show. Oh, and apparently Evan Dando too, as a treat.

Charlie Robison at Gruene Hall

  • Charlie Robison is a genuine Austin treasure, and Gruene Hall is a stellar venue to see him perform. One of the finest singer-songwriters to come out of a town overflowing with them.

Wild Child at Emo’s

  • Austin indie pop band, they’ve got a lot of fun songs. The vocalist reminds me of my favorite New Orleans chanteuse.

Austin tasty eats

local food recommended by a local (it me, I grew up here)

Start here with this guide from Paul Czarkowski and friends for stuffing your face around this place. It could be somewhat out of date, things change pretty fast around here. I’ll add some notes of my own here even though I’ve contributed to that before:

Central TX BBQ

  • Don’t bother with the BBQ sides, it’s all about the meat. Have a nice salad somewhere else before and after or maybe a smoothie from Juiceland. Kerlin BBQ has sadly closed up shop, although they do still sell tasty kolaches. Gourdough’s may have closed too, which would be a blessing for my waistline.

Quesabirria tacos

  • These are still pretty hot right now, but prepare yourself. You dip the tacos in the cup of consomme and it all drips, this ain’t for fancy dress occasions. Bring extra napkins, and eat em fast before the tacos cool off from the griddle.

La Tunita 512 – 2400 Burleson Rd

  • this was one of Austin’s first offerings for quesabirria de res, and they’re delicious.

Actual Tacos

  • There’s Tacodeli and Torchy’s for the white people food that’s pretty tasty, and then there are tacos. These are taco joints.

Cuantos Tacos – 1108 E 12th St

  • Located about a mile away from the Alumni Center, Cuantos serves the sort of tacos you might find in CDMX. They’re good.

Veracruz All Natural (and Veracruz Fonda)

  • Somewhat fancy, somewhat down-to-earth, Veracruz is tasty and I am happy to recommend them to you.

Other Items Of Interest

If you’re spending any amount of time here and need something not covered by this guide feel free to holler at me on whatever social media platform you favor and can find me, I’ll be happy to come up with something that’ll put a smile on your face. I’m glad you’re going to be at the conference, please say hi or wave in my general direction if you get a chance!

Shaun

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by | April 17, 2023 · 4:42 pm

New DevOps Courses Are Out!

James and I were revising one of our LinkedIn Learning courses, DevOps Foundations: Infrastructure as Code to keep up with the times, and while we were out there filming we knocked out some new courses as well!

DevOps for Managers talks about DevOps from the management perspective. What do you need to know, and how can you best unlock the success of the teams you’re working with when they are – or want to – excel at DevOps?

DevOps Antipatterns explores some common pitfalls that people fall into when starting out (or, even, later…)

Check them out! For reference here’s our whole curriculum that the agile admins have put out to help you in your path to thriving in tech.

Agile Admin LinkedIn Learning Courses

DevOps 101

DevOps 200-level

DevOps 300-level

DevOps 400-level

DevSecOps

Cloud Native

Observability

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by | January 10, 2023 · 2:46 pm

DevOps for Managers Library

James and I are working on a LinkedIn Learning course entitled “DevOps for Managers” and I wanted to share some of the books we love that we’ve found helpful in preparing it! We’d love to hear books you think are indispensable for DevOps managers. We’ve generally omitted general management books like First, Break All The Rules and DevOps non-management-specific books like Continuous Delivery, trying to focus on the specific intersection of tech and management.

Here’s our list, post yours in comments!

The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win and The Unicorn Project: A Novel About Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim et al. demonstrate the benefits of DevOps transformations on an organization in a story format.

Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Forsgren, Humble, and Kim gathers the DORA research on DevOps into a summary of how to practice high performance leadership and management.

The DevOps Handbook: How To Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations by Kim, Humble, Debois, and Willis is an encyclopedic guide to implementing the Three Ways in an organization.

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson is specifically about managing modern engineering teams.

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais focuses on team organization and the communication and outcome ramifications thereof.

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by David Marquet isn’t DevOps specific but is a great description of how to enable meaningful decision making at the lowest level. 

Measure What Matters: OKRs – The SImple Idea That Drives 10x Growth by John Doerr describes how to set goals using OKRs and avoid many of the naive goal-setting pitfalls that beset organizations that decide they want to be goal driven.

Smart & Gets Things Done: Joel Spoksly’s Concise Guide To Finding The Best Technical Talent by Joel Spolsky talks about how to attract, hire, and retain the best engineers.

The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t by Robert Sutton talks about traits to screen out to ensure a collaborative organization.

Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by Michael Lopp has a good bit of engineer-managing wisdom.

The Lean Mindset: Ask The Right Questions by Mary and Tom Poppendieck shows how to focus your thoughts and iterate towards good products, including your internal products and services.

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller is intended for Marketing but for DevOps, especially platform teams, being able to concisely define and communicate your value is key.

A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility by Mark Schwartz helps IT leaders take on Agile, Lean, and DevOps.

I’ve heard about Camille Fournier’s The Manager’s Path, Julie Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager, and Lara Hogan’s Resilient Management but haven’t read any of them yet so can’t vouch.

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by | January 7, 2023 · 10:42 pm

DevOpsDays Austin 2023 – Under New Management!

Well, after ten years of running DevOpsDays Austin, James, Karthik, and I feel like it’s time to let a new generation of leaders have a crack at it!

DevOpsDays Austin 2023 planning is underway with a great organizer team – some experienced, some new. I’d like to introduce your new Austin core organizers to you!

Laura Santamaria is a Lead Developer Advocate at Dell and a long time supporter of the Austin tech user group scene, who’s been involved in running Austin DevOps and CloudAustin.

Daria Ilic is Director of People Operations at Six Nines IT (working with me, yay!) and has been an organizer for DevOpsDays Austin and CloudAustin.

Shaun Mouton is a Principal Software Engineer at Mastercard and has been an organizer with DevOpsDays Austin for many years.

All three are great people and we really look forward to seeing how the event continues to evolve under their able leadership! They’ve put together a great organizer team and are full speed ahead, so make sure and buy those sponsorships now and submit talks when they open up!

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by | July 4, 2022 · 5:59 pm

DevOpsDays Austin 2022 Retrospective

DevOpsDays Austin was back in person in 2022 for our 10 year anniversary! So how’d it go? We are committed to transparency and metrics here so enjoy our retrospective.

Financially it went well; we sold 317 tickets and had 296 people show up (an almost unheard of 93% show rate), we were able to donate $28,000 to support the LGBT+ members of our community via Out Youth and The Trevor Project, bringing us to $100,000 donated to charity total over the history of the event, and still ended up with a $1000 increase in our bank account.

We also send out retrospective surveys to our attendees, speakers, sponsors, volunteers, and even our fellow organizers to find out how we’re doing and get an idea of what we should do better on (or keep doing) in the future!

Here’s the deeper details if you want them: DevOpsDays 2022 Retrospective

DevOpsDays Austin 2022 RetrospectiveDownload

To sum up, however, it’s looking good! Our last surveys were from 2019, from our last pre-pandemic DevOpsDays Austin, so we have a previous number to compare to.

Our attendee NPS was up to 77 (44 responses) from 62 (50 responses). And the things people loved were, basically, the personal interaction. Community, people, discussions, and openspaces were the most cited positives by far. We knew people had been missing that for a couple years now so our retrospective format and event plan were specifically designed to promote small group interactions.

The gripes were more varied. Primary was the food, which is fair enough. While we don’t intend to change from a boxed lunch format – it leaves so much more time for the actual conference, so we left fancy catered lunches behind long ago – we were forced to use the venue caterer and they ran out of food especially veggie options, and we had asked for breakfast tacos both mornings and on day two the breakfast was what I can only call “leftover meat bits.” So room for improvement, with the understanding that boxed lunches are here to stay, but we’ll definitely see what we can do about better options and especially making sure there’s not shortages of anyone’s dietary needs.

The other leading concern we’re just plain going to ignore, and here’s why. It was “the retro format – but what about technical talks, what about content for newbies?”

At DevOpsDays Austin we explicitly reject the assumption that all events must be the same generic thing every time. We specifically change our format every year. We’ve had the Monsters of DevOps where we went for flying in big keynoters (including all the authors of the DevOps Handbook) and doing everything up huge; we’ve had DevOps Unplugged where talks were voted in on site and there were no sponsor tables. This year we had a “class reunion” format with talks only being 20 minute “retrospectives” from what the speaker’s learned over their time in DevOps (some speakers were experienced, others were new voices). We very, very clearly talked about this format on our website, social media, and emails to attendees and sponsors. In the end, people just don’t read, and there’s nothing really to do about that. And we won’t be doing the retro format two years in a row, we’ll keep mixing it up!

Organizer feedback was good (we have 20 organizers), up slightly, with everyone enjoying working with the group, and some concerns about unclear roles and roles already taken. That’s always a challenge – we have a lot of organizers but not all of them are up to actually leading something. We have people volunteer to own roles and then encourage them to reach out to the others/the others to chip in when we need something, but that doesn’t always go well, which is frustrating for everyone. In the end, most roles need someone who can commit to consistent participation over the planning period (there’s a couple specialty roles like making signage that can be backloaded, but not many). But we want to be inclusive and not tell people “no, take the year off if you can’t be putting in a couple hours a week including making the organizer calls, and truly own something.” We’ve wrestled with this for 10 years, no clear answer is in sight.

Speakers love speaking at the event. NPS was 92, slightly up from 90 in 2019. They love the audience, how supportive and welcoming they are, and how low stress and chill the experience is. There’s always some AV issues as a fly in the ointment – we do AV checks but not everyone shows up for them.

Volunteers have a good experience too. NPS was 88, slightly down from 94 but still good; we try to make sure that the load isn’t too much on any given volunteer so they can also enjoy the event. Posting the openspace topics is always a challenge each year; we tweet out photos and then desperately type them into the sessionize, but a bunch of attendees are social media impaired I guess and it’s hard to get the schedule to everyone, but there’s not a lot of options given that openspaces are predicated on doing the agenda immediately previous; I’m not sure more time would help short of printing out copies or having live monitors everywhere.

Sponsor feedback was down from 60 to 50 NPS. They do like the audience and authentic content. The main problem was the new venue and unclear flow meant that the platinum sponsor rooms were more out of the way than we’d planned (we gave them tables in the gold area as well once this became clear). And then the general sponsor gripes about it not being a good lead gen event. We always tell sponsors this is a good participation event, not a good lead gen event, no badge scanners, no sponsor list, etc., but a previously mentioned people don’t read, plus the teams being sent out aren’t the people buying the sponsorships and often just assume they’ll be getting a standard conference experience. We sell out every year so I’ll worry about it when that stops.

There’s one other thing worth mentioning, which is that we did require masking at the event and asked people to either be vaccinated or test prior to the event.

One the one hand, a couple sponsors and attendees griped about the masking.

On the other hand, despite other events resulting in superspreading (Kubecon EU, RSA, even some DevOpsDays events):

So, with all due respect, we are very happy with our choice and that we had a safe event. No one likes wearing masks. If you don’t like it enough to not come – don’t come. Hopefully it won’t be necessary next year.

Everything was pretty good! There was one issue, though – in all the survey sub-questions, there was a drop in the perceived friendliness of the organizer team, so we’re going to make some changes there – stay tuned to hear what!

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by | June 30, 2022 · 9:56 am

DevOpsDays Austin Donates to Out Youth and The Trevor Project To Support LGBTQ+ Youth

We were psyched to be back and meeting in person for DevOpsDays Austin 2022 this year! Charitable donation is a part of our Austin tech culture and very important to us, and since it was our 10th anniversary we aimed to hit a total of $100,000 in charitable donations since we started the event in 2012. And we did it! We’re happy to have $28,000 to give to local charities after our event this year.

That left us with the question of who to donate to. We like to choose things that fill the greatest need in our community at the time, and strongly bias towards supporting Austin area charities. Our state government decided to help us make our decision by starting a pogrom of discrimination against LGBTQ+ Texans.

Many of our colleagues in the Austin technology community are gay, lesbian, transgender, nonbinary, or identify with other nontraditional gender identities and sexual preferences, or have family members that are. I myself have a transgender son who I’ve loved and supported through his transition, and now he’s a happy, healthy adult. We find the attempts of the Texas government to institutionalize hostile behavior towards them deeply unacceptable and want to find ways to support them.

We looked initially at charities like Equality Texas that are working to ensure the rights of LGBTQ+ Texans, but as we discussed we wanted our funds to go directly to the benefit of people in need, and not all go to the lawyers fighting the long fight.

Since $28,000 is a lot, we decided to split it up into two $14,000 donations. After some research we nominated two recipients, Out Youth and The Trevor Project, and brought them to the DoDA organizer team for a vote, which they enthusiastically approved.

We selected Out Youth for our first donation as a deeply local Austin organization directly supporting LGBT youth.

For 32 years, Out Youth has supported Central Texas LGBTQIA+ youth and young adults by providing safe places where they are loved, acknowledged, and accepted for exactly who they are. Their life-saving and life-changing programs and services ensure these promising young people develop into happy, healthy, successful adults. Out Youth hosts a variety of programs to keep their youth mentally and physically safe such as drop-in times at their youth community center, by offering free individual counseling and group therapy sessions, and through their in-school-support services. To find out more information about ways to get involved and about their services, please visit outyouth.org today.

It’s funny that our relationships with these charities usually start with us showing up with a big surprise donation and then after that getting deeply involved with the organization; we plan to go tour their house and spread the word about volunteer opportunities with them to the Austin technology community.

Not only do I have a transgender son, but also fellow Agile Admin and conference organizer James lost a brother to suicide. So while The Trevor Project isn’t Austin based per se, it does help many Austinites, and its mission of suicide prevention among LGBTQ+ youth is deeply and personally meaningful to us both. Therefore we chose them for our second donation this year.

The Trevor Project has worked to save young lives by providing support through our free and confidential crisis programs on platforms where young people spend their time — online and on the phone: TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat and TrevorText. We also run TrevorSpace, the world’s largest safe space social networking site for LGBTQ youth, and operate innovative education, research, and advocacy programs.

  • The Trevor Project’s research has found that having at least one accepting adult in an LGBTQ young person’s life reduces their risk of suicide by 40%.
  • Transgender and nonbinary youth who reported having pronouns respected by all of the people they lived with attempted suicide at half the rate of those who did not have their pronouns respected by anyone with whom they lived.
  • “You are lovable” – this is one of the most common phrases The Trevor Project’s crisis counselors share with youth in crisis.
  • According to Trevor’s research 42% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, including more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth.

You can sign up to become a volunteer counselor on their site; there’s extensive training and it requires a year commitment.

In closing, we appreciate the work Out Youth and The Trevor Project are doing and hope that others will look into finding ways to support them as well.

To the LBGTQ+ technologists in Austin, you are welcome, and both DevOpsDays Austin and other user groups we run like CloudAustin have published codes of conduct that don’t allow any hostile behavior towards you at our events, and we look forward to interacting with you there. Happy Pride Month!

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by | June 29, 2022 · 9:11 pm

DevOps War Story – The VMWare Realization

Hey all! There are some stories that were foundational in my path to DevOps that I think illustrate larger issues pretty well. I use them a lot when I do talks or whatever but I figured I might as well put some of them down here to inspire readers.

I was working at National Instruments in the IT department back in the early 2000s. I ran the Web Systems team, alongside a bunch of technology focused teams – the UNIX Admins, the Windows Admins, Notes Admins, Network Admins, DBAs, and various others.

It took 6 weeks to get a new server for the Web. We’d say what we wanted, but then the UNIX admins would spec it out, and then order it from Dell, wait 2 weeks for fulfillment, then it’d come, then the network team would rack and jack it in the server room, the UNIX admins would put the OS on it, various other teams would get their pound of flesh, and then eventually it would get sent to us so we could put our software on it and then let the app teams use it. Not exactly quick turnaround.

Then came VMWare, the shining new star! Their sales rep showed up and said “You know, you can have a new server in 15 minutes.” We went out to a live sales demo and were like “this is very cool.” I asked the sales team, “so I could make the root read only for security reasons and write everything to external storage right?” They thought a minute, never having considered that. “Yes? That’s actually a really good idea.” A coworker and I fist-bumped each other.

Anyway, so we bought it, yet another technology vertical team was formed to own it, and after some degree of enterprise folderol it was in place.

So now when I needed a new server, guess how long it took me?

Four weeks. All we had removed was the 2 weeks of Dell fulfillment. Not 15 minutes.

When the procurement was slow anyway, it was just kind of accepted that 2 weeks turned into 6 weeks in the process. “Well, someone has to carefully assign an IP address, or else everything would be chaos!” But then when it was 15 minutes turning into 4 weeks purely based on our own internal friction (the actual work involved being much less than a day end to end) – suddenly it became clear how much of our own problem we were generating.

But it was hard to fix. There is inevitably niche protection in an environment like that. “Hey UNIX admins, you put cfengine on the boxes to manage them? Can we use that to load on our software too?” “No.” “Hey, can we get our own Web DBA so Web initiatives aren’t always bottom-feeding off the big ERP initiatives?” “No.” Tossing a ball over walls from silo to silo inevitably resulted in complex handoff processes and wait times and resource contention.

So then when we moved to the R&D department and started working up some SaaS products, and we were faced with the option of using our own integral IT department – we said “Absolutely not. There’s this new Amazon Web Services thing and we’re going to do it all ourselves.” “But what about all the value those specialists bring?”

Well, it’s not the specialists’ fault – but the one day worth of specialty benefit they brought was stapled to 4 weeks of sitting on hands, and no one felt it was their role to fix that endemic process problem in the org. I don’t care if you’re offering me Linus Torvalds to fix my Linux problems, if you offer me “a day of Linus and then 4 weeks in solitary,” I’ll do without, thank you very much.

This was 2009, it was before “DevOps,” but we immediately realized that having a product team responsible end to end for the product – code, systems, security, etc. – allowed us to deliver high quality in a fraction of the time that we were used to. It was intoxicating. That’s actually where we Agile Admins met and why we still hang out together today, because we all went through the experience of the gig actually becoming fun again!

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