What to do one your downtime?

Recently, I just had distal biceps tendon repair after trying to take down a large screen TV by myself and found my life quite boring. Luckily, I bought the newly released DevOps Handbook and now I found myself with the time to read it.

Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois and John Willis did a great job in writing anything but a "handbook" and I think that was their intention all along. You won't find detailed instructions for creating a world class DevOps shop, but you will find countless thought provoking ideas on what can make your organization more efficient and effective. You will find buried in its pages many of a "why didn't I think of that," and quite of few "I would have never thought about that," ideas to start to look at your organization with a little more hope of finding ways to improve its performance. And the book is peppered with numerous real world case studies.

The book is broken into several parts from an introduction and where does one start to three sections which I will call the heart of the book.

1. Put the parts in place for an assembly line. Software Configuration Management, Continuous Integration, testing, deployment scripts and tools, etc. Automate as much as possible and improve it.
2. Discover, collect and report the metrics you will need to improve it. This was the one area where I thought I would have never thought of 80% that on my own.
3. Teach and be taught on everything from successes to failures and share the knowledge you learn downstream upstream. The whole process is a learning experience, especially when you release the Chaos Monkey.

As I said the book does not give detailed instructions, it is no DevOps for Dummies but it will give you ideas that may or may not be useful for your organization. I would really recommend this book for everyone in IT from the junior coders, admins, testers, release managers, who will be exposed to much more technology and business drivers than their position offers them. The senior engineers/developers, and product owners will get ideas of what to implement and what metrics need to be collected. InfoSec has a whole part on how they can contribute to the effort as well. And even to management, and especially to upper management I say will benefit from reading this book, as the goal of this book is really "How can IT help make the business more efficient, cost effective, competitive and safe to operate."

While many a company would love to take your money on their new DevOps tools, this book reinforces the idea that their is no magic solution, but there is a philosophy of an integrated workforce, empowered and working together to solve problems before they occur. And before you commit you organization into a multimillion dollar retooling effort spend the $30.00 something on this book first, you will be glad you did.

The best sick present I ever bought myself.