Conway's Law and GitOps

Pulled directly from the introduction of DevOps’ish 272 Conway’s Law and GitOps are two things that go hand in hand. I’d like that not to be the case, but in building and working with an upcoming demo of multi-cluster GitOps, I’m worried GitOps might not reach an escape velocity over Conway’s Law. Conway’s Law states, “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” This might seem natural but think about the different ways we communicate now. E-mail, text messages, phone calls, Slack, Discord, Twitter, etc. are all communication tools that serve various purposes. But, in GitOps, whether you design around a good developer experience (using git as the only interface) or design around a minimalistic amount of tooling (one secret management solution), that tooling has to fit within Conway’s Law usually. ...

June 20, 2022 · Chris Short
Photo used with permission from [Brandon Dimcheff](https://twitter.com/bdimcheff)

DevOpsDays Detroit 2019 Trip Report

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, my views and opinions are solely mine though. I spoke, sponsored (as did Red Hat, my employer, thank you), and worked from the front row of DevOpsDays Detroit 2019 this week. The event sold out for the first time this year. The venue has been the College for Creative Studies in downtown Detroit for the past four years. The venue is awesome, in my opinion, because it puts systems thinkers in a venue space on top of an arts school overflowing with creative ideas. There is art around every corner. Attendees share the elevators with students going up to the event space. It’s both humbling and inspiring. Detroit is a real-life Phoenix Project. Instead of an auto parts manufacturer, it’s the 23rd most populous city in the US (and is ironically, The Motor City). But, the school is putting its students’ ideas to use to rebuild Detroit. Detroit vs. Everybody. ...

October 26, 2019 · Chris Short