Making DevOps Beginner-Friendly with Laura Santamaria

Matty talks with Laura Santamaria, a developer advocate at LogDNA who comes from a self-taught background, about making DevOps friendlier to people who are new to it. Laura has a science degree, worked in teaching and education at a science museum, and then moved into programming, where Laura owned a first production system as a junior engineer. Matty notes that when the show started in 2013 it was meant to be a beginner podcast, for "the people where your boss read about DevOps in the in-flight magazine and came to you and said, hey, we need some DevOps now," and is amazed it took this long to do an episode on the topic. The cold open is Laura's line that "this isn't some type of snake oil."

Why It's Hard to Get Started

Laura says the definition of DevOps is hard to nail down, and "you can't buy DevOps," since it's a cultural shift. Getting into that culture takes history and hands-on experience of things not working, but you need to be part of that world to get the experience, a chicken and egg problem. Matty says context matters: people who've "been in the shit" see why it's better, while newcomers may not see why to push through the hard parts, or may wonder why it's a whole movement at all. Laura is one of the people for whom it was common sense, having started on a system built by a team focused on DevOps, and forgets that others find it unfamiliar, like being told dev does this, hands it to ops, and marketing and sales are elsewhere.

Matty says people worked the old way because those structures solved the problems of their time, not because they were dumb. Matty recalls PagerDuty new-hire orientation, where newer colleagues couldn't see why managing notifications and on-call schedules had been a problem, while Matty remembered spreadsheets and email aliases. Matty also points out that some DevOps beginners are senior technologists who are new to this approach.

Permission to Ask

Laura says the biggest thing for any newcomer is understanding "you're allowed to ask questions." People who've been around in a waterfall culture may not feel it's a safe place to ask why they're being asked to do something, and Laura says a good devopsdays provides that space through open spaces and people who are open to "ask me anything." The hard part is getting people there to begin with.

Matty adds that veterans are jaded because advocates used to be the digital darlings like Netflix and Facebook, and people replied "that's great, but we're a bank." Matty says DevOps Enterprise Summit was among the most powerful things to happen to the movement, since large enterprises and government organizations started talking about their work, and people could say "now you're talking my language." Once you know something can be done, you can probably do it, and "if you don't know that it can be done, it can seem insurmountable."

Laura suggests offering help directly: Laura answers questions in Slack communities and gets DMs from people who are stuck, which models helpfulness. Matty adds that you have to meet people where they are, since not everybody goes to conferences, meetups or Twitter.

Onboarding Onto a Team

For a team welcoming someone new, Laura says to identify the people with the patience to answer the same question a few more times, since not everyone has it, match the person's style with documentation or a person, and set up sandboxes so they can learn by doing without taking down something important. Laura says "you're just going to figure it out as you go" is too intimidating.

Matty says some of this way of working inherently feels wrong to newcomers, like giving devs access to prod, so encourage them to say why they're uncomfortable, since they may raise things the team has stopped questioning. Matty recommends pairing and shadowing, and a living "rules of engagement" document reviewed a couple of times a year on how the team communicates and talks about problems, as a lot of it is undocumented knowledge. Laura likes having each new person update the docs, like being the scribe on an incident, and calls the norms guardrails that can be repaired if they head toward a cliff. Matty cautions that you shouldn't measure success by how many changes were made, but by validating and updating as needed, and says even the author of a runbook should follow it. Laura, who has been a technical writer, says to audit docs every time, because the arrow may now be on the left of the button.

An Unwelcoming Community

Laura says joining any group is intimidating, since you don't know who's safe to ask, and that there's so much going on it's hard to know where to go. Laura was lucky to fall in with a meetup and volunteer at devopsdays Austin, and didn't learn about the community Slack for years. Laura also says that for people with experience, "all your war stories" can be intimidating for people without them.

Matty suggests sharing experience as "thank goodness this isn't true anymore," not "you sweet summer child," and asking what still sucks. Laura's own war stories are about communication, and Laura says marketing, support and sales have the same stories, including the morning after when the emails come in. Matty adds that some exclusivity can be fine in a space such as an open space on AS/400 admin war stories, not as a requirement for the bigger conversation, and Laura calls this a community of practice, like birds of a feather.

Tutorials as Journeys

Matty's tactical point is that tutorials should tell a story of why: "Why does Kubernetes matter?" and "Why did I need an S3 bucket?" Make them journeys, since context is where it fits "into the big smushy world." Laura's closing idea is that DevOps is about zooming in and out, like a camera lens that catches the butterfly on the flower and the whole picture.

Laura will be at Spring Live on March 19th, runs A Minute on the Mic, and is @nimbanatus on Twitter. Matty will speak at FailoverConf on April 21st.

Check out A Minute on the Mic for bite-sized videos from experts on various topics!

Laura

• Spring Live - March 19

Matt

• Failover Conf - April 21