Optimize development with automation — Calvin Hendryx-Parker // Six Feet Up

Quotes

• "Stages one and two. Stage one is laying the stage, building the groundwork for everything else afterward. That's your culture, your issue identification, developer environment setup, stage two, is where we're talking about executing, developing producing code, where code goes, how you triage how you handle security, how you handle things like code reviews" - Calvin Hendryx-Parker

• "Step up and automate; stage three will be about getting into deployment, configuration management orchestration having a CI pipeline. You can start thinking about things like disaster recovery. Many teams don't get to this level because they feel in a hurry. But they're doing themselves a disservice by not investing in this configuration management orchestration upfront, and then doing it all by hand, only to later have not a single soul on the team understand how this infrastructure was ever built" - Calvin Hendryx-Parker

• "If I can spin up an environment for my software, or my application, in any region in AWS, in moments, I have accomplished stage three because I don't care about how the code gets delivered as much as I care about the fact that it's been done in an automated way. And any team member can do it." - Calvin Hendryx-Parker

• "If you can release software multiple times a day, you can recover from any kind of incident easily, like there's no need to roll back to a previous version of the software." - Calvin Hendryx-Parker

• "If you're using the big bang approach to software development delivery, where we're going to release once a quarter or once a month. That's a lot of changes happening at once that are incredibly hard to roll forward, and you almost always have to roll back. And now you're two quarters behind on development and have a huge technical debt backlog that no one wants to look at or touch." - Calvin Hendryx-Parker

• "Configuration management and orchestration sit at stage three; there are many different ways to do it, whether using TerraForm with virtual machines and tools like puppet chef and Salt. Or you've modernized more and gone down the fully containerized. I recommend containerized software deployment to make things more isolated and cross-platform. In that case, it doesn't matter what the target environment is, as long as it can run a container." - Calvin Hendryx-Parker

• "Stage four is really where we get into innovation. It's all about team efficiency and understanding how the whole team moves together and that no one gets left behind, and there's not that tribal knowledge that only one person has." - Calvin Hendryx-Parker

• "As an injury manager, or even as a peer, no one's stuck and not reaching out for the help they need. Developers can be susceptible to many issues." - Calvin Hendryx-Parker