The DevOps Digest: 2022-02-11

This week, we cover Character, Mood Contagion, Product Thinking, Stevie Wonder and Birthdays!

?Enjoy!

?Quote: Stevie Wonder on Character

“Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.”

―?Stevie Wonder

?Tweet: Mood Contagion

Jeff Gallimore on Twitter: "Research paper about how a leader's mood can affect team mood and productivity - for better or worse. First phrase of the paper: "Leaders frequently experience moods." Strong start. Truth bomb right out of the gate. https://t.co/bYsastPUw5 https://t.co/cSe9SyfVFz" / Twitter

Folks at CSG will remember The Shadow Of The Leader where we learned that organizational culture will reflect the style of leadership.?This tweet and paper has some great research on that.

Also see: How to make your team more productive: Start with your shadow – Thinking Focus

Technical Article/Presentation: The Past, Present, and Future of Rails at GitHub

The Past, Present, and Future of Rails at GitHub - GitHub | Devops Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2020 (itrevolution.com)

I've decided to use this space to re-introduce some of my favorite DevOps Enterprise Summit Presentations until I run out which may take a while…?

In keeping with our modernization theme, I want to feature this awesome talk from Eileen Uchitelle.?

?Gene starts with covering some statistics and findings from the security industry: "One of the best ways to stay safe is to keep your dependencies up to date."?

?In this talk, Eileen covers the monumental effort of 7 years that she undertook at GitHub to upgrade from Rails 2 to Rails 5.?It's truly inspiring.?She has some key points:

• The cost of not upgrading is immeasurable
• You will regret forking your framework.?
• You will regret falling behind security releases.
• You will regret deprioritizing upgrades.
• The longer you wait to upgrade, the further you will be from main and the harder the upgrade will be.
• Find a way to move towards continuous upgrades that track main

Note that this video is only available by subscribing to the DevOps Enterprise Summit Video Library. A free membership(10 videos/month) is available as well as individual and corporate memberships.

FYI: IT Revolution announced 2022 Conference Dates. I'm happy to say that the flagship event will be back in Las Vegas this year and in person! Additionally, registration and CFPs for the May Europe Event are now open!?

2022 Conference Dates

DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual - Europe

10-12 May 2022?|??Registration Open?|??CFP Open

DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual - US

August 2-4, 2022

DevOps Enterprise Summit?US Flagship Event?

The Cosmopolitan of?Las?Vegas

October 18-20, 2022

Podcast: Product Thinking - Melissa Perri?/ Dave Dame / Prioritizing Accessibility

Episode 32: Prioritizing Accessibility with Dave Dame — Produx Labs

This is my favorite podcast for information about Product Management. Melissa is one of the foremost leaders on Product Management practices.?She writes quite a bit(see the Build Trap), runs The Product Institute(online training for Product Managers) as well as producing this great podcast.

The Product Thinking Podcast has two different formats.?One format features leaders from the industry who Melissa Interviews.?The other format is called "Ask Melissa" where Melissa fields questions from listeners.?I find her insight and approach enlightening and refreshing.

In this Podcast, Melissa talks with Dave Dame who is the Director of Accessibility at Microsoft. Dave's mission is to help make workplaces and products more accessible and inclusive to employees with disabilities. Dave works directly with product managers and designers to help them create inclusive products with incredible experiences for people with disabilities.

Dave makes a great point that EVERYONE will at some point experience some form of disability and product managers need?to think about this inevitable use case.

Some links to get you started:

Produx Labs

Product Institute | Product Institute

Product Thinking — Produx Labs

Books: Kill It with Fire / 4: WHY IS IT HARD?

We build our computer systems the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins. —Ellen Ullman

Amazon.com: Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones) (Audible Audio Edition): Marianne Bellotti, Katie Koster, Random House Audio: Books

In this chapter, Marianne discusses why modernization starts off looking and feeling easy but is anything but.?She hits on the following:

• There are many hidden technical challenges that you will uncover
• Modernization can appear "boring" and there is little glory
• Organizations launch into them unprepared for the long haul(time, resources, commitment)
• Keeping teams motivated for months or years is difficult
• Convincing and keeping executives bought in for the long term is hard
• Hindsight can be a curse and working systems contain both good and bad decisions as well as latent defects that have been normalized

She summarizes the chapter with a few great points:

• Keep it simple and don't add new problems to solve.?I'll discuss this a little more below.
• Understand context and minimize coupling to dependencies
• Tools and automation should supplement human effort, not replace it.?There is no magic convert button(my emphasis).

In our modernization travels at CSG, we have traversed many of these areas.?

Opportunity 1: Start with foundational technical practices and telemetry

• We will emphasize again, that the best place to start with a legacy system is to add foundational technical practices like CI/CD/CT and also production telemetry.?If you do nothing else, this will help you learn the system and could even improve it enough to not have to do a full modernization.

Opportunity 2: Don't add more problems to solve and work in as few dimensions as possible

• I often tell my folks to move in as few dimensions as possible when modernizing.?I think of systems in two dimensions of: Functionality and Technology.?If you try to move in both dimensions at once, you greatly complicate your journey.?We often see "re-writes" fall in this trap where we modernize the technology but also decide to just make the features better at the same time.?This brings in a ton of complexity because you now are changing the technology, replicating features as well as adding new features or making current features better.?How do you regression test that approach successfully??You also bring in all the organizational change with this.?Not only do you have a re-write on your hands, but you have to convince all stakeholders that the re-write is truly better.?You have set yourself up for failure.?Instead, hold fast and implement feature parity including defects on the new system. Once you have traction on this approach then consider more or different features.

Opportunity 3: Don't let normalized defects defeat you

• I classify defects that have been latent and consumed by customers for many years as "normalized defects".?Your modernization journey will uncover many of these.?Resist the temptation to blindly fix these.?You will also need to go out of your way to preserve the normalized behavior.?I recall one scenario where we found certain XML documents had spacing at the end of tag names.?By default the target platform serializer removed spaces at the end of tag names.?This broke downstream parsers in very bad ways.??We could argue all day that "It's valid XML!!".?But the reality is that hunting down all consumers and getting them to change was near impossible.?Instead we changed the serializer to add a space.?In another case we found that the max message size being passed between systems was a tiny 4KB resulting in many server roundtrips.?We controlled all consumers and were able to make an easy protocol fix to pass large messages and greatly improve round trip performance.?Critically evaluate what you fix here and trend towards preserving behavior.

Something Else: Happy Birthday, Martin Luther and Black History Month

It's my daughter's birthday this week. Happy Birthday Fiona!!?We are so proud of you!?We can't wait to see what you do next!!

While celebrating, we played Stevie Wonder's great song: Happy Birthday.?Our youngest daughter Maisie then taught us something we didn't know.?She said: "Dad, you know that song is about Martin Luther King." I stopped, and asked her to tell us more.?We then pulled up Wikipedia and read the history around the song.

Stevie Wonder released the song in 1980 to promulgate the cause to make Martin Luther King's Birthday a national holiday.?Stevie Wonder popularized the campaign after several U.S. Congressmen and the King Center turned to the general public for support in passing the day as a federal holiday.?As a result, Ronald Reagan signed MLK's Birthday into law as a holiday in 1983.?It would then take 17 years for all states to pass the holiday for state employees with South Carolina in 2000.

This is a great story about perseverance from Stevie Wonder and the King Center. The song had to progress through the UK charts in popularity and reached #2 in 1981.?The song didn't make the US billboard charts until 1999 and only made it to #70 there.?

I'm happy that these things are being taught to our children and I've realized from this discovery I have a lot to learn.?Through this, I'm hoping to do a better job of using my privilege to inform others.

Stevie Wonder's 'Happy Birthday' made Martin Luther King Day possible (montgomeryadvertiser.com)

How the Martin Luther King Jr. birthday became a holiday - National Constitution Center

Happy Birthday (Stevie Wonder song) - Wikipedia

Stevie Wonder - Happy Birthday?

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