In part two of this two-part episode on The DevOpsHandbook, Second Edition, Gene Kim speaks with coauthors Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble about the past and current state of DevOps. Forsgren and Humble share with Kim their DevOps aha moments and what has been the most interesting thing they’ve learned since the book was released in 2016. Jez discusses the architectural properties of the programming language PHP and what it has in common with ASP.NET. He also talks about the anguish he felt when Mike Nygard’s book, Release It!, was published while he was working on his book, Continuous Delivery. Forsgren talks about how it feels to see the findings from the State of DevOps research so widely used and cited within the technology community. She explains the importance of finding the link between technology performance and organizational performance as well as what she's learned about the importance of culture and how it can make or break an organization. Humble, Forsgren, and Kim each share their favorite case studies in The DevOps Handbook. ABOUT THE GUEST(S) Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble are two of five coauthors of The DevOps Handbook along with Gene Kim, Patrick Debois and John Willis. Forsgren, PhD, is a Partner at Microsoft Research. She is coauthor of the Shingo Publication Award-winning bookAccelerate: The Science of Lean Software and The DevOps Handbook, 2nd Ed.,and is best known as lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She has been a successful entrepreneur (with an exit to Google), professor, performance engineer, and sysadmin. Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals. Humble is co-author of Lean Enterprise, the Jolt Award-winning Continuous Delivery, and The DevOps Handbook. He has spent his career tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in companies of varying sizes across three continents, most recently working for the US Federal Government at 18F. As well as serving as DORA’s CTO, Jez teaches at UC Berkeley. YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT Projects Jez and Gene worked on together before The DevOps Handbook came out. What life is like for Jez as a site reliability engineer at Google and what he’s learned. The story behind his DevOps aha moment in 2004, working on a large software project involving 70 developers. The architectural properties of his favorite programming language PHP, what it has in common with ASP.NET, and the importance of being able to get fast feedback while building something. The anguish that Jez felt when Mike Nygard’s book, Release It!, came out, wondering if there was still a need for the book he was working on, which was Continuous Delivery. “Testing on the Toilet” and other structures for creating distributed learning across an organization and why this is important to create a genuine learning dynamic. What Dr. Forsgren is working on now as Partner of Microsoft Research. Some of Dr. Forsgren’s goals as we work together on the State of DevOps research and how it feel to have those findings so widely used and cited within the technology community. The importance of finding the link between technology performance and organizational performance and why it probably was so elusive for at least 40 years in the research community. What Dr. Forsgren has learned about the importance of culture, how it can make or break an organization, and the importance of great leadership. RESOURCES Personal DevOps Aha Moments, the Rise of Infrastructure, and the DevOps Enterprise Scenius: Interviews with The DevOps Handbook Coauthors (Part 1 of 2: Patrick Debois and John Willis) The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations, Second Edition, by Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis, Jez Humble, and Dr. Nicole Forsgren Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Ric...
In part one of this two-part episode on The DevOpsHandbook, Second Edition, Gene Kim speaks with coauthors Patrick Debois and John Willis about the past, present, and future of DevOps. By sharing their personal stories and experiences, Kim, Debois, and Willis discuss the scenius that inspired the book, and why and how the DevOps movement took hold around the world. They also examine the updated content in the book, including new case studies, updated metrics, and practices. Finally, they each share the new lessons they have learned since writing the handbook and the future challenges they think DevOps professionals need to solve for the future. Kim will conclude the series in Part 2, where he interviews the remaining two coauthors, Jez Humble and Dr. Nicole Forsgren. ABOUT THE GUEST(S) Patrick Debois is considered to be the godfather of the DevOps movement after he coined the term DevOps accidentally in 2008. Through his work, he creates synergies projects and operations by using Ag...
In this episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Scott Havens, who is the Director of Engineering at Wayfair, where he leads Engineering for the Wayfair Fulfillment Network. Havens is a leading proponent of applying functional programming principles to technical and organizational design. Previously, Havens was the architect for Walmart's global omnichannel inventory system, unifying availability and replenishment for the largest company in the world by revenue. Havens shares his views on what makes great architecture great. He details what happened when an API call required 23 other synchronous procedures calls to return a correct answer. He discusses the challenges of managing inventory at Wal-Mart, how one implements event sourcing patterns on that scale, and the functional programming principles that it depends upon. Lastly, he talks about how much category theory you need to know to do functional programming and considerations when creating code in complex systems. Before...
In this episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim shares and gives commentary on Scott Havens’ talk from the 2019 DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas. Havens is a Director of Engineering at Wayfair, where he leads Engineering for the Wayfair Fulfillment Network. He is a leading proponent of applying functional programming principles to technical and organizational design. Previously, Scott was the architect for Walmart's global omnichannel inventory system, unifying availability and replenishment for the largest company in the world by revenue. In his 2019 DevOps Enterprise Summit talk, Havens highlights functional programming and e-commerce systems work. He also talks about what he did to massively simplify those systems while also making them more testable, reliable, cheaper to operate, and easier to change. Finally, he discusses the implications of using functional programming to change how to design systems and systems of systems on a larger scale. ABOUT THE GUEST Scott Havens is Direc...
In this newest episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Gail Murphy, Professor of Computer Science and Vice President of Research and Innovation at the University of British Columbia. She is also the co-founder, board member, and former Chief Scientist at Tasktop. Dr. Murphy’s research focuses on improving the productivity of software developers and knowledge workers by providing the necessary tools to identify, manage, and coordinate the information that matters most for their work. During the episode, Kim and Dr. Murphy explore the properties of modularity and information hiding, and how one designs architectures that create them. They also discuss how open source libraries create the incredible software supply chains that developers benefit from everyday, and the surprising new risks they can create. They discuss the ramifications of system design considerations and decisions made by software developers and why defining software developers’ productivity remains elusiv...
In this episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Steven Spear on his critiques of several articles from the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal, and their characterization of the impact of Just-in-Time (JIT) supply chains and the widespread shortages caused by the COVID-19 global pandemic. While the unprecedented health crisis created a widespread shortage of almost everything—from toilet paper to semiconductor chips to raw materials vital for medical materials—with results that impacted everyday life on a global scale, Dr. Spear makes the claim that JIT lessened the severity of shortages, as opposed to causing them. The discussion is informed by Spear’s work on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations and the Toyota Production System, and from his time observing and working directly with a tier-one Toyota supplier. Kim and Spear dive deep into supply chain dynamics and why they are important to society. The discussion delves into how JIT manufacturing not o...
In March of 2021, Gene Kim visited the mass vaccination site at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, which has been described by the press as a logistical masterpiece where over 465,000 Oregonians have been vaccinated as of May 2021. After a three-hour tour of the site, Gene Kim sat down with Trent Green, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Legacy Health and one of the organizers of the mass vaccination operation. Kim and Green discuss firsthand what it looks like to vaccinate 8,000 people a day and the strategic level of planning it took to produce and operate the mass vaccination clinic. Green reveals what those first few days of operation were like and how the site was able to increase distribution from 2,000 vaccines per day to 8,000 per day. Lastly, he discusses the lessons he learned during the rollout process and how those lessons can inform how to improve the overall health care system. Also joining the conversation is Dr. Steve Spear, who has hel...
In the second part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim continues his conversation with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University and creator of the Westrum organization typology model. In part two of their conversation, Kim and Westrum talk about generative cultures and why Westrum thinks they are more important now than it they were a hundred years ago. Westrum also shares his observations on the increasing number of functional specialities in organizations. He discusses the challenges that arise from having matrixed organizations and the tools to overcome these challenges. Finally, Westrum previews the new book he’s working on about information flow within organizations. ABOUT THE GUEST Ron Westrum is Emeritus Professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University. He holds a B.A. (honors) from Harvard University and a Ph.D in Sociology from the University of Chicago. Dr. Westrum is a specialist in the sociology of science and ...
In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University. His work on organizational culture and his contribution of the Westrum organizational typology model have been instrumental in understanding what makes a high-performing organization across industries. For decades, he has studied complex organizations from medicine to aviation to the nuclear industry. In part one of their conversation, Kim and Westrum talk about the stark contrast between NASA’s highly experimental culture of the Apollo space program versus the highly compliance-driven culture of the US Space Shuttle program, and Westrum’s opinions on how to bring that experimental culture back. They also discuss the origins of the Westrum organizational typology model and some of the insights that led to it. Finally, Westrum shares what organizations should do when things go wrong in complex systems. ABOUT THE GUEST Dr....
In the second part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast Gene Kim and Admiral John Richardson, former Chief of Naval Operations, continue their discussion on the importance of leadership in large, complex organizations, especially enabling leadership training early in one’s career, and exploring why he views it as so important. Admiral Richardson also shares why radical delegation is needed more than ever, and provides tools and techniques for enabling it. Kim and Admiral Richardson discuss the important characteristics needed to integrate problems solving into an organization. And finally, they talk about the nature of the US Naval Reactors that are responsible for the safe and reliable operations of the US Naval Propulsion Program, why that warrants the command of a 4-star admiral, and what should ideally happen when accidents occur in complex systems. Also joining the conversation is Dr. Steve Spear, who has written extensively about the US Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program p...