devops

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs?

In the first episode of a two-part series, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, authors of the new book Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, join the Dev Interrupted podcast to share their secrets to successful team patterns and organization design. They also discuss how to build adaptive team models capable of evolving with technological change and organizational maturity.

When it comes to security tools, you’re typically balancing two things: how much time it takes for a tool to run to get deeper results vs. the quality of results returned.

As you might expect, faster tools scan just the source code in a single repo (without looking in the open-source libraries and SDK used) and may detect easy-to-find vulnerabilities. In contrast, tools that give better results and can find more challenging vulnerabilities with fewer false positives require more time to complete their scans.

If you’re an SRE, there’s a decent chance that you live and die by the “Four Golden Signals.” Alongside similar concepts like the RED Method, the Four Golden Signals form the foundation for many a monitoring and observability strategy today.

That’s not a bad thing. In many ways, the Golden Signals excel at distilling complex monitoring processes down into a core set of easy-to-digest concepts.

Technology forms the major backbone of our society today. However — not all technology is accessible to people with disabilities, which comprise around 15% of the world’s population. According to the 2021 WebAIM study, “97% of the top one million home pages had accessibility issues.” Moreover, according to an analysis from UsableNet Inc., the number of web accessibility lawsuits is expected to reach a total of a whopping 4,195 in 2021. These statistics reveal that we, in the software community, can do a lot better to make our technology more accessible. Software engineers can contribute by baking accessibility in their development process instead of waiting until accessibility auditing or fixing bugs at the end. Here are a few ways on how to get started:

1. Review the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

These are an extensive set of guidelines on how to make your web application accessible to not just users who use screen-readers, but also other types of disabilities such as Deaf/Hard of Hearing, cognitive or motor disabilities. Many of these guidelines and principles also apply to Desktop based applications or really any technical product you can think of.  For software engineers focused on web development and who want to learn more the accessibility infrastructure of the web, I recommend reading up on Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) and the Accessibility Tree.

The Current State of DevOps

DevOps is getting even more traction compared to five or ten years ago. The initial reason was the experimentation of development teams and organizations to achieve better outcomes and make more impact on their customers, but what does it mean to have a better outcome? What are we trying to measure?

The very short answer is value; but more specifically, the actual value the organization is trying to provide to their customers. The development, operations, security, and other teams work as one team! This team can identify and improve their organization. Common metrics to focus on include:  delivery rate, achieved testing coverage in the application code, security vulnerabilities detected, mean time to recovery, and change failure rate.

This week, I want to take a break from my Start Rust series and focus on a different subject. I’ve already written about my blogging stack in detail.

However, I didn’t touch into one facet, and that facet is how I generate the static pages from Jekyll. As I describe in the blog post, I’ve included quite a couple of customizations. Some of them require external dependencies, such as:

The last decade has seen massive shifts in software engineering tools, processes, roles, and teams as developers seek to streamline and automate processes to improve the speed of software releases and facilitate continuous delivery. Teams (especially those scaling up) are looking for ways to boost productivity but prevent an influx of burnout, technical debt, and organizational instability. As many organizations shift from monoliths to microservices, teams are looking for ways to maximize efficiency and reduce pain points. One way forward, especially as organizations scale is to change the configuration and function of teams. 

Seminal texts such as Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais’ Team Topologies offer a ‘how to’ in organizational design and team interaction, especially for software development teams. But it’s not only about improving team configuration for optimal value but also the tools used by these teams. 

Introduction

The most vital element of digital transformation is, ironically, human transformation. Of course, delivering more compelling, more interconnected, and just all-around more applications faster than ever requires a high degree of automation. But delivering digital experiences that truly matter to your business and its customers? You simply can’t do that without effective leadership, collaboration, and strategy. And that’s where the human element of DevOps is absolutely essential.

We are constantly upgrading our technology stacks — but what about our people? What skills are most important for enterprise DevOps success today — and what’s the best way to develop these skills amidst the constant pressure to deliver more, better, and faster?

A lot of things can go wrong during the Olympics. Broken legs, food poisoning, and, of course, pandemics can throw a wrench in the years of careful planning that athletes and organizers put into the Games.

Here’s another common, but often overlooked, source of disruption at the Olympics: IT failures. Disruptions to the IT infrastructure that powers the Olympics and makes them viewable by audiences across the globe are more frequent than you may think. It’s only thanks to the work of world-class SREs that these problems are remediated before they exert a serious impact on spectators and athletes.