COVID-19 is more than just a pandemic

Reader question: What are your favorite cultural shifts from the last year (and more)

This article first appeared in DevOps’ish 210 and was 100% inspired by K Rain Leander The idea for the subject of this article came from K Rain Leander. Rain asks… “The past year has been one of lockdowns, increased security and decreased travel. DevOps became DevSecOps became DevSecOpsBiz. And the world embraced the work / life balance culture of DevOps. What are your favourite cultural shifts from the last year? What do you want to let go of forever?...

March 29, 2021 · 5 min · Chris Short
Three images that represent who Chris Short is

A getting to know you exercise

In November, I went down to Raleigh to meet my team for planning meetings and team building. For a few of my teammates, this is our first face to face interaction with each other ever. My boss wisely gave us a relatively simple assignment. Create a slide sharing what we’ve done this year and want to do next year (which I’ll share to an extent in a later post). Create another slide listing three things that make us who we are (born in a unique place, grew up on a farm, etc....

December 20, 2019 · 4 min · Chris Short
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The Importance of Psychological Safety

I have mentioned this a few times in various talks, on social media, and in my newsletter; the importance of psychological safety in creating effective teams is often overlooked. Google did an enormous amount of research to determine, “the secrets of effective teams at Google.” Code-named Project Aristotle, Google wanted to nail down, once and for all, what factors contributed to team effectiveness. The number one contributor to team effectiveness at Google was surprising at the time; psychological safety....

August 8, 2018 · 4 min · Chris Short
Grief sticken woman

Miscarriage: A Culture of Silence Helps No One

Julie and I have experienced a miscarriage. We found out we were pregnant in early November. On Thanksgiving, an episode occurred that demonstrated Julie’s life might be in jeopardy as well as the life of the baby. There was a glimmer of hope that all could go well though; we had to give it time. A week before Christmas 2017, we learned that our second child wasn’t going to make it....

December 23, 2017 · 4 min · Chris Short

Tiny Tiny RSS: Loathe the Asshole Devs

I’ve been messing around with Tiny Tiny RSS today. Upon discovering it I posted in their Google+ Community asking how other users implemented it and what they thought of a specific use case I had. I got some good responses and was quite appreciative of them. I opted, at the advice of those in the community, to setup Tiny Tiny RSS on RedHat’s OpenShift and was pleasantly surprised by how the product RedHat created....

June 1, 2013 · 2 min · Chris Short