Product Development on Brave New Geek

Platform Engineering as a Service

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 13:47:29 -0700

Like most industry jargon, “DevOps” means a lot of things to a lot of different people. While many folks view it as specific to certain tooling or practices, such as CI/CD or Infrastructure as Code (IaC), I’ve always viewed it as an organizational model for how software is built and delivered. In particular, my interpretation is that DevOps is about shifting more responsibilities “left” onto developers, moving away from the more traditional “throw it over the wall” approach to IT operations. No doubt this encompasses tooling or practices like CI/CD and IaC, which are responsibilities that developers now shoulder, perhaps with the support of dev tools, productivity, or enablement teams—some companies just call this the “DevOps” team.

Security, Maintainability, Velocity: Choose One

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 11:41:24 -0600

There are three competing priorities that companies have as it relates to software development: security, maintainability, and velocity. I’ll elaborate on what I mean by each of these in just a bit. When I originally started thinking about this, I thought of it in the context of the “good, fast, cheap: choose two” project management triangle. But after thinking about it for more than a couple minutes, and as I related it to my own experience and observations at other companies, I realized that in practice it’s much worse. For most organizations building software, it’s more like security, maintainability, velocity: choose one.

Cloud without Kubernetes

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 11:58:13 -0700

I think it’s safe to say Kubernetes has “won” the cloud mindshare game. If you look at the CNCF Cloud Native landscape (and manage to not go cross eyed), it seems like most of the projects are somehow related to Kubernetes. KubeCon is one of the fastest-growing industry events. Companies we talk to at Real Kinetic who are either preparing for or currently executing migrations to the cloud are centering their strategies around Kubernetes. Those already in the cloud are investing heavily in platform-izing their Kubernetes environment. Kubernetes competitors like Nomad, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, OpenShift, and Rancher have sort of just faded to the background (or simply pivoted to Kubernetes). In many ways, “cloud native” seems to be equated with “Kubernetes”.

Meeting notes lose value the moment you finish writing them—and it’s time to fix that

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 10:25:44 -0600

I like to be prepared in meetings. In some ways it’s probably an innate part of my personality, but it also became more important to me as my role has changed throughout my career. In particular, the first time I became an engineering manager is when I started to become a more diligent notetaker and meeting preparer. I think this is largely because my job shifted from being output-centric to more people- and meeting-centric. I still took notes and prepared when I was a software engineer, but it was for a very different context and purpose. As an engineer, my work centered around code output. As a manager, my work instead centered around coordinating, following up, and supporting my team. If you’ve never worked as a manager before, this probably just sounds like paper-pushing, but it’s actually a lot of work—and important! The work product is just different from that of an individual contributor.

SRE Doesn’t Scale

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 09:44:55 -0600

We encounter a lot of organizations talking about or attempting to implement SRE as part of our consulting at Real Kinetic. We’ve even discussed and debated ourselves, ad nauseam, how we can apply it at our own product company, Witful. There’s a brief, unassuming section in the SRE book tucked away towards the tail end of chapter 32, “The Evolving SRE Engagement Model.” Between the SLIs and SLOs, the error budgets, alerting, and strategies for handling change management, it’s probably one of the most overlooked parts of the book. It’s also, in my opinion, one of the most important.

Structuring a Cloud Infrastructure Organization

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 11:21:46 -0600

Real Kinetic often works with companies just beginning their cloud journey. Many come from a conventional on-prem IT organization, which typically looks like separate development and IT operations groups. One of the main challenges we help these clients with is how to structure their engineering organizations effectively as they make this transition. While we approach this problem holistically, it can generally be looked at as two components: product development and infrastructure. One might wonder if this is still the case with the shift to DevOps and cloud, but as we’ll see, these two groups still play important and distinct roles.

We suck at meetings

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 13:16:18 -0600

I’ve worked as a software engineer, manager, consultant, and business owner. All of these jobs have involved meetings. What those meetings look like has varied greatly.

As an engineer, meetings typically entailed technical conversations with peers, one-on-ones with managers, and planning meetings or demos with stakeholders.

As a manager, these looked more like quarterly goal-setting with engineering leadership, one-on-ones with direct reports, and decision-making discussions with the team.

As a consultant, my day often consists of talking to clients to provide input and guidance, communicating with partners to develop leads and strategize on accounts, and meeting with sales prospects to land new deals.

Digitally Transformed: Becoming a Technology Product Company

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 09:46:47 -0600

More and more established businesses are attempting to reinvent themselves as technology companies. At the heart of this is the digital transformation, a journey many organizations are undertaking in order to better compete and serve their customers. As a result, companies are pouring tons of cash into digital transformation strategies. For some, this means broader adoption of agile or DevOps practices. For others, it’s modernizing product offerings or moving to the cloud. Regardless of the changes, many are struggling to find success transforming themselves due to low throughput, quality issues, or failing to deliver the right thing at the right time. In a few cases, digital transformation has ended in outright disaster.

Planting Perennials Next to Potholes

Fri, 26 Apr 2019 14:35:24 -0500

Silos, bikesheds, and focusing on what matters

If you’ve ever flown into Des Moines then you’ve had the privilege of driving on what might be the most decrepit major road in the metro area. An important artery, Fleur Drive is the only way to get to and from the airport, and the pavement is marginally better than that of a dirt road. Cars weave back and forth to dodge potholes and massive cracks in the asphalt as people race to catch their flights. There always appears to be some kind of construction going on somewhere along the six mile stretch of road, and yet, it never seems to actually improve. The road is also located in a major floodplain, so sometimes the city just closes it when the nearby river rises too much. It’s basically what you’d get if you agiled your way through urban planning.

Operations in the World of Developer Enablement

Thu, 24 Jan 2019 11:28:40 -0600

NewOps is not a replacement for DevOps, it’s an evolution of it by looking at Operations through the lens of product. It’s what I’ve come to call “Developer Enablement” because the goal is to shift the focus of Ops teams from being masters of production to enablers of production. Through Developer Enablement, teams are enabled—and tasked with the responsibility—to control their own destiny. This extends far beyond just the responsibility of building products. It includes how we build, test, secure, deploy, monitor, and operate systems.

Multi-Cloud Is a Trap

Fri, 14 Sep 2018 11:16:09 -0500

It comes up in a lot of conversations with clients. We want to be cloud-agnostic. We need to avoid vendor lock-in. We want to be able to shift workloads seamlessly between cloud providers. Let me say it again: multi-cloud is a trap. Outside of appeasing a few major retailers who might not be too keen on stuff running in Amazon data centers, I can think of few reasons why multi-cloud should be a priority for organizations of any scale.

GCP and AWS: What’s the Difference?

Tue, 17 Jul 2018 11:58:21 -0500

AWS has long been leading the charge when it comes to public cloud providers. I believe this is largely attributed to Bezos’ mandate of “APIs everywhere” in the early days of Amazon, which in turn allowed them to be one of the first major players in the space. Google, on the other hand, has a very different DNA. In contrast to Amazon’s laser-focused product mindset, their approach to cloud has broadly been to spin out services based on internal systems backing Google’s core business. When put in the context of the very different leadership styles and cultures of the two companies, this actually starts to make a lot of sense. But which approach is better, and what does this mean for those trying to settle on a cloud provider?

Scaling DevOps and the Revival of Operations

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 10:07:42 -0500

Operations is going through a renaissance right now. With the move to cloud, the increasing amount of automation, and the increasing importance of automation, Ops as we know it is reinventing itself out of necessity. Infrastructure is becoming more and more sophisticated—and commoditized—and practices are just now starting to grow up around that. So while some worry about robots taking our jobs, the reality is more about how automation will help augment us to build better software and focus on higher-value things. It’s not so much about the distant future—whatever that may hold—so much as it is about the next five to ten years, what Operations looks like in that timeframe, and why I think it has to retool.

More Environments Will Not Make Things Easier

Wed, 11 Apr 2018 15:49:47 -0500

Microservices are hard. They require extreme discipline. They require a lot more upfront thinking. They introduce integration challenges and complexity that you otherwise wouldn’t have with a monolith, but service-oriented design is an important part of scaling organization structure. Hundreds of engineers all working on the same codebase will only lead to angst and the inability to be nimble.

This requires a pretty significant change in the way we think about things. We’re creatures of habit, so if we’re not careful, we’ll just keep on applying the same practices we used before we did services. And that will end in frustration.

Plant Trees Before You Need the Shade

Mon, 29 Jan 2018 11:12:18 -0600

Like humans, companies go through phases. There’s the early seed and development phase. Founders are so preoccupied with a problem they go crazy. They consider solutions and the feasibility of a business. There’s the startup phase, when a business is actually born, and it stumbles towards product/market fit. There’s the growth and scaling phase, as we try to close more and more deals while, at the same time, hiring the right people. If we’re lucky, we reach the later stages. There’s the expansion phase, as we attempt to land and expand or attack new verticals or geographies. This is when things get really interesting—and hard. Who are the right people to hire? What are the right products to build? The formula that got us here almost certainly won’t get us there. Lastly, there’s maturity, which is when the business has really hit its stride. Maybe there’s an exit, and very likely there’s new leadership involved.

The Future of Ops

Wed, 03 May 2017 20:12:57 -0500

Traditional Operations isn’t going away, it’s just retooling. The move from on-premise to cloud means Ops, in the classical sense, is largely being outsourced to cloud providers. This is the buzzword-compliant NoOps movement, of which many call the “successor” to DevOps, though that word has become pretty diluted these days. What this leaves is a thin but crucial slice between Amazon and the products built by development teams, encompassing infrastructure automation, deployment automation, configuration management, log management, and monitoring and instrumentation.

Pain-Driven Development: Why Greedy Algorithms Are Bad for Engineering Orgs

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 15:33:00 -0500

I recently wrote about the importance of understanding decision impact and why it’s important for building an empathetic engineering culture. I presented the distinction between pain displacement and pain deferral, and this was something I wanted to expand on a bit.

When you distill it down, I think what’s at the heart of a lot of engineering orgs is this idea of “pain-driven development.” When a company grows to a certain size, it develops limbs, and each of these limbs has its own pain receptors. This is when empathy becomes important because it becomes harder and less natural. These limbs of course are teams or, more generally speaking, silos. Teams have a natural tendency to operate in a way that minimizes the amount of pain they feel.

Decision Impact

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 19:53:34 -0500

I think a critical part of building an empathetic engineering culture is understanding decision impact. This is a blindspot that I see happening a lot: a deliberate effort to understand the effects caused by a decision. How does adopting X affect operations? Does our dev tooling support this? Is this architecture supported by our current infrastructure? What are the compliance or security implications of this? Will this scale in production? A particular decision might save you time, but does it create work or slow others down? Are we just displacing pain somewhere else?

Shit Rolls Downhill

Thu, 14 Apr 2016 10:43:09 -0500

Building software of significant complexity is tough because a lot of pieces have to come together and a lot of teams have to work in concert to be successful. It can be extraordinarily difficult to get everyone on the same page and moving in tandem toward a common goal. Product development is largely an exercise in trust (or perhaps more accurately, hiring), but even if you have the “right” people—people you can trust and depend on to get things done—you’re only halfway there.

Product Development is a Trust Fall

Tue, 05 May 2015 18:15:23 -0500

A couple weeks ago, Marty Cagan gave an outstanding talk at CraftConf on why products fail despite having great engineering teams. In it, he calls out many of the common mistakes made by teams, and I think there is an underlying theme: trust.

Product development is a trust fall. In order to be successful, a chain of trust must be established from the business all the way down to the engineers. If any point in that chain is compromised, the integrity of the product—and specifically its success—is put in jeopardy.