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As part of preparing for my talk at DevOpsDays Detroit, I did a significant amount of research into military failures. It was hard to find a military failure that did not evoke an emotional response or political discussion. But, I was prepared to talk about two: The 1961 Goldsboro B-52 Crash and the failed Iran hostage rescue, Operation Eagle Claw. In the case of Operation Eagle Claw, you can draw a comparison to the old IT silo mentality of Dev and Ops being two different teams with very different objectives. The mission planners (Developers in this example) failed to consider a solid delivery process to production (deployment of operators into combat). The Developers assumed Operations would do things a certain way without much testing prior to deployment. The Operations team (special operations forces) demonstrated that the assumptions made by the Developers (mission planners) were not rooted in reality. ...

A former co-worker and now friend used to have a tagline, “Everyday is a school day.” I remind myself of this fact nearly every time I learn something new. 2016 brought a lot of new knowledge and skill sets into my ever-expanding arsenal of tools. Surprisingly, 2016 brought a mix of both soft skills and technical skills. Let’s review some of the things I picked up during this journey around the sun: ...

I had the opportunity to present What The Military Taught Me About DevOps at the Triangle DevOps Meetup last night. It was a fantastic group of people and I fielded a lot of great feedback after speaking. One takeaway I have from the talk, is that I need to get better at speaking on diversity issues. But, that is for another time. One person asked if I would be willing to share my slides. I informed him that they were already shared but I think the notes that accompany the slides are important to share too: ...

It’s 2016 (almost 2017) why is the time off on your system clocks? It became apparent to me that there are some folks out there that do not realize their clocks are off for a reason. Julia Evans recently made a graphic about distributed systems that mentioned clock issues and it made me really sad. Photo Credit: Julia Evans We had a saying when I was in the Air Force, “Timing is everything.” We lugged around GPS receivers that hooked up to our bulk and circuit encryption devices so that they would have accurate, consistent time with other encryption devices around the world. ...

The month of October was quite unique for me. I went to a number of conferences and talked to tons of people from all walks of life. All of the events were great; DevOpsDays Raleigh, AnsibleFest Brooklyn, DevOpsDays Detroit, and All Things Open are all events I would recommend to anyone considering them. One distinctly unique opportunity was to sit down with the folks from The Cloudcast to tell my DevOps story. The Cloudcast #277 - DevOps Perspectives from the Front Lines is available on their site or you can listen here: ...