Lightning Talk: Talk DevOps to me!

Hello.

So you are here to learn from kindergarteners. I can assure you, I have vast expertise in this area. How many of you can claim that you went through this experience once, having a kindergartener? How about twice? How about three times? No one.

Okay, it looks no one can beat me. I went through kindergarten four times with my kids, so here's what we can learn from them.

The first step is: be open-minded.

Do you remember going with your kids to the playground, and the first time they see other kids playing, they just jump right into the game and say, "Hi, friend"?

So have the same type of attitude when you work with your other teams in your company. So turn to the left, turn to the right, and say, "Hi, friend."

Perfect.

And be open to diversity.

Okay, so remember, people are coming with different experience to DevOps. They have different perceptions of the speed of deployments or steps it takes to deploy software. For example, my son was certain that I weigh 400 pounds.

All right. We are very lucky that we have different tools at our disposal. So as the old saying says, work smarter, not harder. Take advantage of the tools that you have, and a small plug for our company: use deployment tools from Octopus Deploy.

Tip number four: one of the benefits of deploying faster is that you will have customer feedback much faster, so you can improve your product. So learn from it, so next time you are releasing the product, it's in much better condition than this one.

You can see, yes, maybe he's up to something. We're skipping the vowels.

All right, are you familiar with this? That's a report card, and it's designed to help you evaluate how we are doing and if there is a room for improvement. So we're lucky that we have DORA metrics that you can apply. And as you can see, my daughter, although she excels at all the academics, she still has room for improvement. She needs to learn how to work quietly.

All right. Making DevOps work comes with its challenges. The times where we were working Monday to Friday, eight to five, are over. We're being asked to carry a pager and being available to jump into bridge conferences right away. And sometimes it means in the middle of your kids' basketball games. Or have you tried it while you have to breastfeed your baby? So yes.

So remember, this is the plan that our kids have. There is always a time to work hard, to fulfill your work obligations, but there is also time to have fun. So yes, there needs to be time to sweep the stairs, and there needs to be time to play ping-pong. And that's a short list of my son for [inaudible].

Okay. Hopefully you never got this yellow sheet. It is a below-the-line notification. Oh yes, my son was hiding in the closet instead of going to the bathroom. Well.

But the same day, they're asked to write a Fix-It plan and sign it. And I had to sign it as well as a parent.

So anytime you're getting a customer escalation, customer incident, make it your responsibility to come up with a Fix-It plan and commit to it.

Step number seven: as we spend most of our time at work, it is your job to make sure that your team is happy. And sometimes it does mean removing toxic people. So at the end of the day your team can say, "I feel happy."

Step number nine: as we move to continuous deployment, it is much harder to have big celebrations. We no longer deploy once a year, and we do it with a big party and big fanfare. So you have to rethink it. You have to reframe the reasons to celebrate.