Ron’s Smoked Turkey Recipe

Smoking a turkey seems like a task you may not want to be assigned. There’s tremendous downside if your turkey doesn’t turn out. You could potentially have a dozen or so diners waiting on you and if you fail you won’t have time to recover. This recipe has been attempted several times and it always …

How I Explained DevOps to My Dad

I was hanging out with my dad recently when an old question came up yet again: “Tell me again, son, that software you sell, what does it do?” Oh no, I thought. Here we go again. So I launched into my spiel, explaining software development lifecycles and constraints, and how release automation tools and Service Virtualization software work to …

Happy Fathers Day

Taking your kids to work is an important step in showing them nothing comes without work. Taking your kids to an all night concrete pour and having them sleep in the car is something they will remember forever. We stayed up as much as possible to watch 2350 cubic yards of concrete pour into a …

How a CIO Transformed a Trash Giant’s IT Culture

Implementing or evaluating change is an uncertain and, often, scary process. Should I change? What do I change? When do I change? IT systems, departments and staff are no different. Everyone agrees, in principle, that IT should be leading change since computing capabilities have grown exponentially over the past decade, but too often we find …

Patrick Debois: Size Doesn’t Matter When It Comes to DevOps

There are few people more knowledgeable about the meaning and importance of the DevOps moment than Patrick Debois. He practically invented it, and he organized the very first Devops Days event in the development dark ages of 2009. So, naturally, we thought of Patrick when we decided to ask some thought leaders to help us define the …

Gene Kim: For The Prepared, DevOps Naysayers Help The Movement

There are people out there who think the DevOps movement is overhyped, or that it’s some kind of fad. Gene Kim, co-author of “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Bu…, couldn’t disagree more, but he’s glad those naysayers are out there because more people need to know about the problem that DevOps …

Bean There, Done That

Mung beans are a healthy food source that grow without being planted in soil. To begin the growth process, they are soaked in water for twelve hours over night. Afterward, the water is poured out and the beans start growing [courtesy of photosynthesis*]. My experiment explores whether it is better to soak mung beans in …

Is It Even Possible for DevOps to Take Apart Silos?

DevOps, at its core, is really about destroying silos, those calcified and insular management systems that make it impossible for people to collaborate across the enterprise. Breaking down silo walls is a chore facing managers in pretty much every industry. Volumes of management books are written on it. When it comes to delivering better apps …

Is DevOps Overhyped or the Real Thing?

In the buzzword-filled wasteland of enterprise technology, DevOps has to rank somewhere near the top of the hard-to-define list, right up there with “cloud” and “big data” (or its subset, “dark data.”) Describing these things is like soldering Jell-O to a motherboard. DevOps is a different case than the others because, while it certainly has …