State of DevOps: stuck in the middle with you

The 2021 "State of DevOps Report" is out early this year with great insights about cultural blockers among the 40K professionals who responded.

Hit & Fade, Forgotten Ruin book 2 by Jason Anspach & Nick Cole

Lots of fun as the story continues, 4/5 Stars.  Can't wait for the next one.

E-Day by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

Puke awful terrible, 0/5 Stars.  I put it down after a few dozen pages.

Openness and Employee Engagement

Limeade has published a study that aligns to my introspective value of openness and transparency.  It's always a great feeling to find data that agrees with your opinions.  Of course it is much better to seek out and find data that can help changes your opinions. . .

A new approach to working with legacy software by the ThoughtWorks team

The ThoughtWorks folks frequently publish great insights into software development.  I always enjoy Martin Fowler's books and articles.  I came across this cool article on working with legacy code holistically.  It touches on many critically important but frequently overlooked factors such as culture, team composition, and and great objective key results (OKRs).  If you work in software, this article is worth reading.

Forgotten Ruin by Jason Anspach, Nick Cole

Sometimes "tech meets magic" is cool.  I enjoyed this one. 4/5 Stars.

Escape Attempt by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

The stories are all very entertaining and very thought provoking.  I still have trouble with "unreliable narrator" and always reading between the lines, but I did enjoy this collection.  3/5 Stars.

A hold in the sky - arkship trilogy book 1 by Peter F Hamilton and Elizabeth Kleft

Not good. Terrible pacing, gaping plot holes, ridiculous motivations, 1/5 Stars.

Galaxy's Edge Book 11 Legacies by Nick Cole & Jason Anspach

Season Two kicks off with a fun, new story in the "Galaxy's Edge" universe.  Cool new story features with a few more clues about the mysterious, hidden, powerful entities behind controlling politics in the galaxy, 4/5 Stars.

Best Practices Cult

(Cargo Cult practice)

Michael Haupt has pointed us at a great blog post about how software development organizations frequently slip into behaviors driven by the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc (that follows this, therefore this causes that), or more colloquially "cargo cult" practices. DomK goes into detail about how many organizations blindly follow "Best Practices," without ever questioning if there could be better approaches that are much better or evolving these practices over time.  And Michael links to an example.

 I posted about this antipattern with respect to agile practices in 2014. Michael's summary and advice are actually better and more general.  Focus on the success measures of the mission and be prepared to change your practices when they are no longer optimal.  "The nines don't matter if your customers are unhappy."  Keep looking for how to get better at accomplishing your mission and don't assume "best practices" are "best" for your team.  Improve, continuously.