Author: Josh

Trust: What is?

Trust: What is?

by and | Community, God, People

Fun fact – the Building Reliability blog post was originally called “Building Trust.” It was old content – some day we’ll tell the story of everything that happened between when it was originally published and when we published it here, but suffice it to say that a lot changed okay.

Because of what changed, Laine was immediately and thoroughly triggered by defining trust in some part as “doing what people expect of you.” Some number of arguments later, we agreed that what’s described in that post is reliability – which is in fact different from trust. And…then we started trying to define and explain trust. Turns out, it really isn’t easy. After a lot of paying attention to where we stumble in trusting other people (spoiler alert: we’re both awful at it, actually…), this post was born. Finally.

We’re going to explain in more detail, but here is the basic definition:

Trust: believing that the other person loves you enough to figure it out – whatever it is.

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Why Containers

Why Containers

by and | Technology

In this blog post, we’re going to talk about distributed architectures, and the progression they’ve made over time. We’re going to do this because a long time ago, when we were watching the Getting Started with Docker training on PluralSite, Josh started ranting about this very topic and Laine told him it should to be a blog post because the information that just falls out of his head sometimes is really cool. You’re welcome, internet!

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Puppet Mastery, Manipulation, and Control

Puppet Mastery, Manipulation, and Control

by and | God, People

“It works as long as you’re the smartest, but then the curtain comes back. Nobody likes being manipulated.”

People hate that word, “manipulation.” As a rule, they don’t hate the concept unless they’re on the receiving end of it, and even then sometimes they appear to prefer it to dealing with…well, reality.

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Lean Enterprise Innovation

Lean Enterprise Innovation

by and | Leadership, Organizations, Technology

(FYI, we’re using affiliate links to Amazon in this post!)

Technology innovation is vital. It can enable business success – and it can also drive business innovation.

If a business falls behind the technology curve, it opens itself up to the risk of under-serving its customers, and eventually being out-maneuvered and defeated in the marketplace. This happens over and over to businesses, where a competitor’s technological innovation pushes them right out of existence – see Blockbuster (Netflix), and Border’s (Amazon, B&N). Amazon has also innovated while JC Penney has stagnated – department stores could have taken the world by storm via the internet – but their online presences weren’t good, certainly not as good as their competitors, and therefore neither were their sales figures.

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Plan Replace Me

Plan Replace Me

by | Community, Leadership, Organizations, People

One of the greatest things about being a leader, for us, is building deep, enduring relationships with the people and teams we work with.

One of the hardest things, for us, about being a leader is leaving the relationships we’ve built. This is a sad, painful process. We love people a lot, and we keep leaving, maybe because there are always more dragons to teach people how to slay.

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Why Developers Love SonarQube

Why Developers Love SonarQube

by and | Human Architecture, Organizations, Processes, Technology

We’ve seen a lot of tool transitions across a large enterprise, and one of the coolest examples was changing the opinion of the company we worked for regarding source code analysis. We had a tool that was under-licensed, slow, ineffective, and largely ignored. At best, it was a check box labeled “we’re definitely secure, you guys!” that everyone on the ground ignored.

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OpenShift’s JDK11 S2I is Generally Available!

OpenShift’s JDK11 S2I is Generally Available!

by and | Technology

If you’re a Java developer who’s been working with OpenShift 3.x for a while, odds are very high you’ve worked with their OpenJDK 8 S2I image.

That container includes Red Hat’s S2I magic, which can take a git URL or a JAR and turn it into a running Java application. Combined with Spring Boot, it’s a fantastic way to get running Java containers in minutes.

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Libertarian Enterprise Governance

Libertarian Enterprise Governance

by and | Leadership, Organizations, People, Technology

Be Good

There is freedom and peace and pride in being truly good at something.

Not to seem good.

Not to check off the boxes of good.

But to actually be good.

Everyone should have the freedom to be actually good.

Establishing governance philosophy in an enterprise is a tricky combination of “how much do we trust our people?” and “okay, but how much do we actually trust our people?” The fact is, people are going to screw up. Some of them might deliberately try to screw something up, but mostly they’ll just make mistakes. If the organization can’t handle mistakes, that’s a problem with the adaptability and flexibility of the organization, not with its people. This means that people’s potential mistakes are not a reason to default to not trusting them.

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Tech Lead Delegation – Baby Steps into Leadership

Tech Lead Delegation – Baby Steps into Leadership

by and | Leadership, Organizations, Technology

One of the first steps a technical leader takes is taking over as a team lead. In IT, this is often called a Dev Lead, Tech Lead, or Architect, depending on a company’s teams and title structure, or it can be more understood than titled.

This type of technical leader might not have direct reports, but accepting ownership of the team’s technical success is leadership, and it’s one of the first big responsibility changes and perspective shifts in the process of becoming a technical leader.

Technical leadership means taking on ownership of a team’s technical success.

In the two-part series Technical Leadership Progression, we defined “technical leadership” differently – if you’ve read that one, here we’re using it to mean specifically the Single Team Ownership phase.

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