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Human DevOps

by Richard Bown

Join my newsletter for regular views and news about doing effective, essential human DevOps engineering. I dive into the human factors that make successful DevOps organizations and the teams and platforms at the heart of your socio-technical systems. From leadership to team setup, maximizing performance, tools and techniques.

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Featured Post

Human DevOps - Sunday 21st April - Staying Relevant and Respectful

Is it just me, or is April turning out to be a complete stinker? The rain hasn't stopped, it's cold, and it feels more like October or November than it does at the start of spring. This feeling appears to be pervading work at the moment, too—I sense frustration bubbling under at every turn. We need some warm sunshine and a few days off before heading back to the grind. I have a short trip coming up and a few things to look forward to not least the just-announced Fast Flow Conference in London...

3 days ago • 1 min read

It's notable how trends take a long time to get moving, and suddenly, they seem everywhere. For the last month or so, I've been working for the Team Topologies organisation, helping them gather some knowledge about applying their ideas and techniques across the industry. I've been talking to agile and DevOps practitioners, consultants, and coaches, people who are using techniques in organisations to make them more humane, to make them more pleasant places to work, and to improve the flow of...

10 days ago • 2 min read

A couple of weeks ago, I ran the Amstelveen Marathon in support of Suicide Prevention NL. It's the first marathon I've attempted in over 12 years and my fifth overall. My fastest time ever was 3 hours 46 minutes. This time, I hoped to complete it in under 4 hours 30 minutes. I figured that with decent training, including some strength training, I'd be able to manage this okay. However, I really learned an important lesson on the day. I eventually completed it in an undistinguished time of 4...

24 days ago • 2 min read

FastFlow meetup #3 at TeamRockStars IT in Amsterdam Last Thursday night we hosted the third Fast Flow NL meetup in Amsterdam. A small but vibrant group of practitioners shared their ideas and passions about how teams get better together and how architecture finds a way. More than that, we had a lot of fun and laughter and we shared a lot of war stories.Afterwards during mingling this quote for me stood out: "I love being in a room where you can say 'mob programming' and everyone is nodding...

about 1 month ago • 1 min read

As a lifelong coder and professional software geek, I've always been interested in the systems we use to build software. Lately, I've realised that these systems are often social — much more so than technical. Consequently, I've connected with the great and the good in the world of what I'm calling "humane software development". For me, this work is spearheaded by the work that Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais have done with Team Topologies. Since the end of last year, I've been an official...

about 1 month ago • 1 min read

Yesterday, someone got me on a call and was trying to force me something to do something that I didn't want to do. I told them this wasn't in line with how our team worked. I also told them that wasn't something that I felt comfortable doing.Then I had to repeat myself, three times.They were trying to gain a shortcut, perhaps make themselves look important, I really have no idea. I had to give them the feedback that I felt "hijacked" and that I would need to talk to my boss about it. Then...

about 2 months ago • 1 min read

If you've followed the story of Maxine Chambers in the Unicorn Project, then you know it's not a simple "10x engineer saves the day" engineering tale of derring-do. It's a struggle; it's hard for Maxine. Her story starts with an effective demotion because she's taken the blame (or been pinned) for an outage. The rest of the book explores the toxic culture at the fictional company Parts Unlimited. We learn about the people, the places, the feelings and that elusive thing 'culture' that the...

2 months ago • 1 min read

It's February. So, what's going on with your project? What's happening in your organisation? Are people happy? Are improvements being made? Over the last few weeks, I had a few thoughts about improving from the ground up. I work day-to-day as a DevOps engineer, and from there, I can shape interactions we have as a team with other teams and also what products (or platforms) we offer. I feel lucky to have this role as I get to work with many developers with different challenges in multiple...

3 months ago • 1 min read
Friday 12th January - Leading with Kindness

January can seem like a long month in the Northern Hemisphere. This last week certainly seemed like a very long week! I hope you can start to think about the weekend. I’ve recently explored the subject of happiness in software engineering from an organizational perspective and explored the foundations of how software organizations comes about and why we occasionally find it so difficult to square. Let’s start with the concept of the happy individual building an application. It gets more...

3 months ago • 2 min read
Friday 22nd December - It's a Wrap

So what else is there to say at the end of 2023 other than "Phew, we made it!"? What did you learn this year? I learned that microservices architectures can be punishing for inexperienced teams and that monolithic architectures, while simpler, can be similarly perplexing when you mix cloud build cycles and tool integrations. In our modern hybrid-cloud enterprise, we increasingly need network chops to make sense of the connectivity of our solutions and the tooling that supports them. My...

4 months ago • 2 min read
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