Privacy is an increasing concern, whether you are texting with a business associate or transmitting volumes of data over the Internet. Over the past few decades, cryptographic techniques have enabled privacy improvements in chat apps and other ...

Two teams of five is not the same as one team of 10.

This team?s low morale and high stress were a result of the members feeling overwhelmed by too many responsibilities. The 10-by-10 communication structure made it difficult to achieve consensus, there were too many meetings, and everyone was suffering ...

Why DevOps encourages us to celebrate outages.

If IT workers fear they will be punished for outages, they will adopt behavior that leads to even larger outages. Instead, we should celebrate our outages: Document them blamelessly, discuss what we've learned from them openly, and spread that knowledge ...

Emulating the efficiency of in-person conversations.

The physical world has social conventions around conversations and communication that we use without even thinking. As we move to a remote-work world, we have to be more intentional to create such conventions. Developing these social norms is an ongoing ...

Leveraging expectations for better communication.

People often use lists of various sizes when communicating. I might have 2 reasons for supporting the new company strategy. I might tell you my 3 favorite programming languages. I might make a presentation that describes 4 new features. There is 1 ...

Application programming interfaces speak louder than words.

Do you have disdain for your customers? Do you wish they would go away? When you interact with customers are you silently fantasizing about them switching to your competitor’s product? In short, do you hate your customers? In this article, I document a ...

Automation helps collaboration.

Software acumen is the new norm.

A casual request for a demo dataset may seem like a one-time thing that doesn’t need to be automated, but the reality is that this is a collaborative process requiring multiple iterations and experimentation. There will undoubtedly be requests for ...

Software is eating the world. To do their jobs well, executives and managers outside of technology will benefit from understanding some fundamentals of software and the software-delivery process.

Automation and a little discipline allow better testing, shorter release cycles, and reduced business risk.

Using SQL databases is not an impediment to doing DevOps. Automating schema management and a little developer discipline enables more vigorous and repeatable testing, shorter release cycles, and reduced business risk. When you can confidently deploy new ...

IaC + PR = GitOps

GitOps lowers the bar for creating self-service versions of common IT processes, making it easier to meet the return in the ROI calculation. GitOps not only achieves this, but also encourages desired behaviors in IT systems: better testing, reduction of ...

A.B.A. = Always be automating.