Guiding IT Performance with OKRs
I recently read John Doerr’s book Measure What Matters on OKRs. (OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results.) They’re part of a goal-setting process that sets goals with key results…
Revisiting Rails
By Adam Hawkins, IOD Expert
Earlier this year, I decided to build an SaaS MVP. My goal was simple: achieve MVP quickly. I considered using Rails instead of my standard approach. I wagered that Rails’ focus on rapid development outweighed the negative architectural trade-offs. Plus, I figured it would be worth it to experiment and give Rails another try after years away. I eschewed my concerns and set out to build the MVP.
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The 4 KPIs Behind High-Performance IT
I recently read Accelerate - The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations. The premise is that a) DevOps principles and practices lead to…
Containers the Best Choice for CD? Think Again
By Adam Hawkins, IOD Expert
I’m a continuous deployment advocate, and I hope you are, too. I’m not pitching CD in this post because I think the benefits speak for themselves. What I want to examine today is how to build strong continuous deployment pipelines.
Containers and orchestration solutions such as Kubernetes immediately come to mind since they’re today’s default target. The industry is moving towards containers, but adopting these technologies does not make sense for every single team in all circumstances. You may not need containers. There are other options and some, frankly, are simply better alternatives.
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Why I Went All-in with Containers…and the Fails Along the Way
By Adam Hawkins, IOD Expert
I’ve worked in tech for the last 10 years, mainly building, deploying, and running backend systems. I started out building PHP web services. Next, thankfully, came Ruby on Rails. I took the plunge into single page applications with Ember.js a few years later, but soon went running back to backend and service work.
The company I previously worked for went all in on Docker shortly after version 1.0, so the team and I experienced all the changes that went along with it. My last big project at the company was replacing our hand-rolled Docker orchestration system with Kubernetes. It was a huge challenge, but an impactful learning experience. Now, I want to pass some of that knowledge onto you by sharing my story of adopting, developing, and running production containers.
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