The Agile Admin

How I use AI as a sounding board for home organization — while keeping every decision mine. I spend most of my days thinking about how developers can get more out of AI tools — how to prompt better, delegate smarter, and stop treating these models like a fancier search engine. And somewhere along the way, I started applying the same thinking to my shed. Yes. My shed. The one with the Greenworks…

There’s a new DORA report out from Google, but it’s not the usual DevOps one we’ve come to expect – this one is entirely focused on the state of AI-assisted software development. That’s not too surprising, straight up DevOps is last decade’s news – Gene Kim rebranded the DevOps Enterprise Summit and is publishing vibe coding books, the DevOps OGs like Patrick Debois and John Willis have been…

How does OpenAI compare versus a penguin in the role of a legal secretary? Let’s see… import openai import os from dotenv import load_dotenv, find_dotenv _ = load_dotenv(find_dotenv()) # read local .env file openai.api_key = os.getenv('OPENAI_API_KEY') def get_completion(prompt, model="gpt-3.5-turbo", temperature=0): messages = [{"role": "user", "content": prompt}] response =…

A recent project delay at work put me in mind of this recurring issue I’ve seen with a lot of agile teams. That is, reluctance to call something a blocker. Karthik and I are working on a new revision of our LinkedIn Learning courser “DevOps Foundations: Lean and Agile” so I decided to dig into this a bit. I think many engineers believe a blocker is “something that prevents me from doing any work…

This came up today at work and I realized that over my now-decades of cloud engineering, I have developed a very specific way of using tags that sets both infra dev teams and SRE teams up for success, and I wanted to share it. Who cares about tags? I do. They are the only persistent source of information you can trust (as much as you can trust anything in this fallen world) to communicate…

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…

“What is my manager’s deal, anyway?” Here’s some career advice that can help you build a more effective relationship with your manager. Remember, they may be a manager but they don’t know everything, or everything that you do, and they are navigating work and life with just as much trepidation as you are! If you haven’t been a manager, it’s sometimes hard to understand why they’re doing what…

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…

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…

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…

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 –…

DevOps for Managers Library

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,…

DevOpsDays Austin 2023 – Under New Management!

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…

DevOpsDays Austin 2022 Retrospective

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,…

I'm happy to announce that DevOpsDays Austin has donated $28,000 to @OutYouth and @trevorproject! #PrideMonth

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…

DevOps War Story – The VMWare Realization

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…