Today, DryRun Security, came out of stealth as the co-founders James Wickett (me) and Ken Johnson (@cktricky) launched the company. To the readers of The Agile Admin, you’ll know that I post about security and its connection with devops from time to time. We launched the company because the arc of the industry has created silos where legacy security solutions have  been geared towards security professionals rather than those who write the software.  This leads to three significant gaps.  The first is testing for security issues after it’s been deployed leads to wasted developer ..read more

I have been in technology management for more than 20 years now and have worked in a wide variety of shops, and I think I’ve identified a key element that creates a good leader, and that is gratefulness. Gratefulness Empowers Recognition Everyone knows that “employee recognition” is important for morale; any company cites it as a priority whether they are really doing it or not. Sometimes it just gets forgotten – but sometimes there’s excuses given not to do it, concerns about it “sounding artifical” or that “they get thanks in form of their salary” or “people will be uncomfortable or jealous ..read more

Hey all! James and I are preparing to revise our LinkedIn Learning course, DevOps Foundations, a three hour set of videos designed to orient beginners in the whole scope of DevOps.  We created the course in 2016 primarily because at the time there were no good introductions to DevOps. You needed to know what blogs to follow and what events to go to and that was it. Even the DevOps Handbook hadn’t come out yet. And this provided a very high barrier to entry to the field. And we believe in learning and collaboration so we knew what we had to do! Since then, it’s been one of the top tech cou ..read more

Well, the Agile Admins have handed the reins of DevOpsDays Austin off to a new generation! And DoDA 2023 is coming up next week! I’ll be there, participating rather than wrangling for once… Shaun Mouton, one of the new core organizers, asked me to share an annotated overview of items which may be of interest to attendees! So read on, and hope to see you out at the conference. Austin musical notes for Visitors and Interested Parties DevOpsDays Austin 2023 is coming up quite soon, and I thought I’d mention for the out-of-towners and folks who might want to know that there are some decent shows ..read more

James and I were revising one of our LinkedIn Learning courses, DevOps Foundations: Infrastructure as Code to keep up with the times, and while we were out there filming we knocked out some new courses as well! DevOps for Managers talks about DevOps from the management perspective. What do you need to know, and how can you best unlock the success of the teams you’re working with when they are – or want to – excel at DevOps? DevOps Antipatterns explores some common pitfalls that people fall into when starting out (or, even, later…) Check them out! For reference here’s our whole curriculum that ..read more

James and I are working on a LinkedIn Learning course entitled “DevOps for Managers” and I wanted to share some of the books we love that we’ve found helpful in preparing it! We’d love to hear books you think are indispensable for DevOps managers. We’ve generally omitted general management books like First, Break All The Rules and DevOps non-management-specific books like Continuous Delivery, trying to focus on the specific intersection of tech and management. Here’s our list, post yours in comments! The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win and The Unicorn P ..read more

Well, after ten years of running DevOpsDays Austin, James, Karthik, and I feel like it’s time to let a new generation of leaders have a crack at it! DevOpsDays Austin 2023 planning is underway with a great organizer team – some experienced, some new. I’d like to introduce your new Austin core organizers to you! Laura Santamaria is a Lead Developer Advocate at Dell and a long time supporter of the Austin tech user group scene, who’s been involved in running Austin DevOps and CloudAustin. Daria Ilic is Director of People Operations at Six Nines IT (working with me, yay!) and has been an organ ..read more

DevOpsDays Austin was back in person in 2022 for our 10 year anniversary! So how’d it go? We are committed to transparency and metrics here so enjoy our retrospective. Financially it went well; we sold 317 tickets and had 296 people show up (an almost unheard of 93% show rate), we were able to donate $28,000 to support the LGBT+ members of our community via Out Youth and The Trevor Project, bringing us to $100,000 donated to charity total over the history of the event, and still ended up with a $1000 increase in our bank account. We also send out retrospective surveys to our attendees, speaker ..read more

We were psyched to be back and meeting in person for DevOpsDays Austin 2022 this year! Charitable donation is a part of our Austin tech culture and very important to us, and since it was our 10th anniversary we aimed to hit a total of $100,000 in charitable donations since we started the event in 2012. And we did it! We’re happy to have $28,000 to give to local charities after our event this year. That left us with the question of who to donate to. We like to choose things that fill the greatest need in our community at the time, and strongly bias towards supporting Austin area charities. Our ..read more

Hey all! There are some stories that were foundational in my path to DevOps that I think illustrate larger issues pretty well. I use them a lot when I do talks or whatever but I figured I might as well put some of them down here to inspire readers. I was working at National Instruments in the IT department back in the early 2000s. I ran the Web Systems team, alongside a bunch of technology focused teams – the UNIX Admins, the Windows Admins, Notes Admins, Network Admins, DBAs, and various others. It took 6 weeks to get a new server for the Web. We’d say what we wanted, but then the UNIX admins ..read more