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
Image from [rework.withgoogle.com](https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/)

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
Photo courtesy [**Elissa Shevinsky**](https://twitter.com/ElissaBeth)

DevOpsDays Atlanta 2018: DevOps is Not War

I went to DevOpsDays Atlanta for the first time this week. I hadn’t been in Atlanta in a very long time. It sure has changed a ton. Originally, I was going to help run the SJ Technologies booth. But, a speaker had to back out at the last minute and I was asked to fill the spot. I was working on a talk for ChefConf so I quickly finished that up and gave it to the good folks at DevOpsDays Atlanta....

April 19, 2018 · 1 min · Chris Short

DevOps is Not War

Abstract Over the past 500 years, there have been 16 cases of a rising power threatening to displace a ruling power. 75% of those cases resulted in war. Although your organizational transformation probably won’t lead to war, it could be contentious. History can help prevent conflict when driving change. This talk will analyze human tendencies, historical data, and provide real-world examples of how to avoid conflict during your DevOps journey....

March 2, 2018 · 6 min · Chris Short

DevOps 101

This talk has been deprecated and remains for reference Abstract With the need to build, test and release software more rapidly, frequently and reliably the concept of DevOps has never been more popular, and to a degree, more misunderstood. DevOps skills are consistently highly sought after and in huge demand, yet at the same time little education and training is available in both the professional world and in higher education....

February 28, 2018 · 9 min · Chris Short