
What I learned leading Ops at GitHub, Heroku, DigitalOcean, and more [slides] - kiyanwang
http://www.slideshare.net/MarkImbriaco/what-i-learned-leading-ops-at-github-heroku-digitalocean-and-more
======
imbriaco
Hi, I'm Mark Imbriaco. That's my deck.

As I said in response to another comment in this thread, I don't often share
my slides without the context of the recording of the talk that went with it.
That recording isn't available yet, but these slides have more words than most
of the ones I present usually do so I thought I'd share them.

In my talk, each of the main points was accompanied with an anecdote to give
some background on the experiences that led me to believe them, as well as
some expand on the content of the slide.

The talk was specifically built for an audience of attendees of the DevOps
Enterprise Summit. It's a fantastic event with one of the most thoughtful and
engaged group of attendees I've experienced, and I've been to a lot of
conferences. These folks are, generally speaking, development or operations
leaders at enterprise companies who are in the midst of a transition to a
style of work that's a significant departure from traditional enterprise IT.
Since much of what we call DevOps now is built on the way that many of us in
the world of startups and Internet companies have been doing things for a long
time, Gene Kim asked me to share some ideas that I think are universal.

It was one of the most fun talks I can remember since I was given the license
to tell stories. ;)

~~~
kderbe
The recording is now available:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KuAN41liTY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KuAN41liTY)

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iamleppert
All I saw there were a bunch of cliches. Maybe the actual talk was more
insightful?

~~~
fragmede
And yet, from a short list of a dozen or so aphorisms (and not clichés), the
same mistakes are made over and over again, which is why you hear them over
and over again.

Everyone's heard "practice makes perfect" until it's become tired and
overused, yet when's the last time you practiced restoring from backups from
scratch onto a fresh machine? How _sure_ are you, that there isn't a setting
in `/etc` before it's usable in production and isn't in puppet/chef/ansible?

Or practiced failing over by firing up a entirely new cluster in a new AZ (and
a new set of AWS keys), and failed over to that?

From this slide deck in particular, "Fight Hero Culture" (slide 6) isn't one
that I've managed to take to heart (but I'm working on it), and I still don't
like apologizing, _especially_ when I was wrong (slide 11).

You might think about the "cliche" "Empathy is a core value" (slide 13) and
think about how you might apply that to your comment.

I hope a video of stories from the actual talk is posted soon!

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alphadevx
Great deck, some really nice advice in there for technical leaders.

~~~
alphadevx
Okay I'm getting down-voted for complimenting this as a great deck (?), so let
me expand on why I think it is:

\- Slide 6 "Fight hero culture", this is a real problem in many organizations
where I have worked, I have written about this before:
[http://www.alphadevx.com/a/423-Hero-driven-
development](http://www.alphadevx.com/a/423-Hero-driven-development)

\- Slide 10 "Make it safe to learn", we all know that a blame culture still
plays a big part of many organizations, and we all need to work against that
to enable honest discussions about failures.

\- Slide 13 "Empathy is a core value", if you cannot understand why the other
guy is pissed off about some issue, you will struggle to care about fixing it.
Put yourself in someone else shoes for a change.

\- Slide 18 "Build a culture of shipping", focus on deliveries not dates.

\- Slide 20 "Do the simplest thing that could work", most engineers will jump
to the complex solutions first (myself included), learn to test the obvious
first.

\- Slide 21 "Beware the illusion of agreement and be explicit", just because
someone is silent in a discussion does not mean that they are in agreement.
They might work against the consensus as soon as the discussion is over.

~~~
m_fam_wa_k
"Thank you" and "Great work" are perfectly valid responses. These jackasses
that down vote should be penalised. _That_ would be karma.

~~~
Chris2048
"valid" responses, but not really any more useful than "me too" posts.

~~~
kellytk
Agreed wholeheartedly.

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jsegura
Is there any recording on this? Could you share the link?

~~~
NachoDuck
Doesn't look like it's been posted yet, should be soon though -
[https://twitter.com/DOESsummit/status/797099082862837760](https://twitter.com/DOESsummit/status/797099082862837760)

