DevOpsDays Minneapolis

Live at the First DevOpsDays in the Midwest

Matty records from the first DevOpsDays Minneapolis, the first one in the Midwest, and his first DevOpsDays and first Ignite talk. With Trevor away, Chef's Julian Dunn co-hosts. Julian says this is about his fourth DevOpsDays and that what's interesting is the local flavor. In an open space the day before on how not to be a pointy-haired boss, someone said direct feedback is harder in Minnesota because of a "Minnesota nice" complex, where giving direct feedback is considered impolite.

Small Teams, Big Companies

Ryn Daniels, the one-person ops team at GameChanger, gave a talk called "DevOps is Dead" that uses a simplified Gartner hype cycle. It argues the term has been used and misused until it's a buzzword, especially for recruiters, and tries to return to first principles. At her company the developers are all on call, which she says aligns incentives, because they're the first line when something breaks and care more about the quality of their own product. She calls it the best DevOpsDays she's attended, with more culture than tools and plenty of open spaces.

JP Morgenthal, who leads cloud computing and DevOps practice at Perficient, is also at his first one. He says people at other conferences won't open up to a stranger about a broken job or a bad boss, while in an open space they share quickly, and the discussions are "far better than any cloud or DevOps conference that I've been to so far." He notes a small team like Ryn's can make headway that a Fortune 2000 company with embedded fiefdoms and legacy systems struggles with, and asks what a company with 40,000 people in IT can learn from a one-person ops team's revenue per employee.

Matty brings in Jez Humble's point from the previous episode about maneuver warfare, and adds that enterprises used to keep quiet about their DevOps work, so people heard only about Facebook and Netflix, and he talks of "no-logo customers" who do the work but won't go on record. His view is that big companies are made of small teams, and small teams are made of people.

Command and Control, If You Trust the Command

Patrick Debois asks JP whether he'd follow command and control if he trusted the command. JP's answer is that in the military the alternative is death, and that the people below "look up and go, what an idiot. I could do it so much better." Matty thinks the answer is that leaders earn trust by showing trust: he'll still coach and sometimes can't share information, but in a culture of trust people assume there's a reason. He says he said trust "like 35 times, and I think there's a reason." Ryn says visibility and transparency are what built her trust in managers, and Matty's rule is that "transparency is the default, and you override it as needed and as rarely as possible."

An audience member, a group technology director, says he oscillates between high-trust and command-and-control and describes directional shepherding, where strong individual contributors form a mesh toward a shared goal. Pure command and control fails because "no one is omnipotent."

Conway's Law, On Purpose

Matty wonders whether an organization's culture drives its software architecture, since in places without trust service-oriented architecture never occurs to anyone, because you can't rely on a contract with people you don't trust. JP and Ryn both name Conway's Law. Julian asks whether it's like Moore's Law, something to respect, or something to explode. JP reports an open space the day before on "anti-Conway's Law," concluding that it's an observation, and asking whether organizing yourself on purpose would shape the product. Some examples suggested it did. An audience member adds that language matters, since calling work a product instead of a project changes how a team feels about it.

The Bounty That Created a Black Market

An audience member from SPS Commerce says enterprises re-evaluate trust with statistics, since they need business numbers, and that incents teams to make the graph look okay. "Are you gonna come to work and do a good job, or do you wanna look like you're doing a good job?"

Matty recalls a Scott Adams story about a company that paid testers a bounty for every bug found and developers a bounty for every bug fixed, and overnight a black market in bugs appeared, until they'd paid out around $6,000 in the first week. The audience member suggests getting the Freakonomics authors to study DevOps culture, and JP recommends the book Business at the Speed of Trust.

How DevOpsDays Started

Matty asks Patrick and Bridget Kromhout how everyone ended up here. Bridget's version is that she showed up at a local meetup where people were hoping to start a DevOpsDays Minneapolis, was asked to help, and said yes, and that with a great team such things are possible. She told Patrick it's a franchise: "We're not gonna always do things your way." He's run about 30.

Patrick tells the origin story. After 15 years working in government, he was moving a data center and looking for process ideas. The team tried Scrum, which was too slow for day-to-day work, then Kanban, and he wrote a paper for the Agile conference in Toronto in 2008. At the same conference Andrew Clay Shafer had scheduled a birds-of-a-feather session on Agile infrastructure and gave up when nobody came, since Patrick arrived after he'd left. They connected on Twitter, and when Patrick said someone should hold a conference, someone tweeted back "why don't you run your own conference?" He took the open space format from Agile events in Belgium and added morning talks to inspire the afternoon discussions.

Bridget says the hardest part was keeping the schedule on time for the livestream audience, since people on Twitter were asking if it was down. Patrick offers as evidence of how she runs things that when a vegan speaker couldn't have the hotel's cookie, she went to a food co-op to buy a vegan one. Bridget's reasoning: "the chocolate chip cookie is not accessible to you, you're not having a good experience."

First-Timers, Goats, and Marketing

Several audience members are at their first DevOpsDays, and praise the quality and depth of the conversations. One asked what the unicorn and goat things were about, and says the strong sense of community is what people are looking for. Matty says his own Ignite talk started as a joke ("All good talks start as a joke, that's my new theory"), and that the room is full of people who want you to win, so it's a good place to speak for the first time. Patrick says he writes presentations to sort out his own ideas, and the audience listening is a bonus.

Bridget takes up the in-jokes: she went to her first DevOpsDays the previous October, so it's not a closed community, and the team that called itself the Sparkly Post-DevOps Princesses got the worst score in the O'Reilly animals trivia, while a local team of people who didn't consider themselves DevOps walked away with the prizes.

An audience member suggests the community define its own identity instead of leaving it to recruiters. Matty relays an open space idea from a Chicago attendee, "what do you want marketing to say about DevOps?" which he loves because it means "stop complaining and help us do it right."