100 Days of Lockdown

Lockdown started 100 days ago, when my children were sent home from school. Since then we’ve lived within these 4 walls, but it looks like the new normal will start on 4th July. Time to reflect. blog.mindrocketnow.com

Over three months on, and I’m still trying to come to terms with how the world has changed. Some things I thought I knew turned out to be different, and I realised that many things that I’d taken for granted were great privileges. I did also get some things right. Let me know in the comments if any of these ring true for you.

Which predictions I go right

Family time

We have become closer as a family. Even though we’re within these four walls, we have that healthy combination of personal space that we enjoy being alone in, and companionship whenever we want it. Family was always important; now it’s central, and we’re all thriving as a result.

Indulging

The additional time gave me opportunity to indulge my hobbies of playing music, gardening, reading comics, geek cinema. The additional time also gave me the opportunity for physical and mental self-improvement. It feels like an indulgence to be able to spend the time to go for a run or meditate or learn a new drum fill or just sit still and read, without worrying about what I should be doing instead.

Job hunting sucks

I’ve made a career of doing interim roles for the past decade, and I’ve enjoyed the pattern of changing contexts every couple of years. However, the job market slowed to a stop, at least for my niche. The hot opportunities I was pursuing before lockdown became cold. One might return, but the others have just evaporated into silence. And new ones to replace them are few and far between. Job hunting is a test of resilience at the best of times. This isn’t the best of times. This is going to suck even more than normal.

Financial impact

It took a long while for our financial health to recover from the fallout of the banking collapse, because we were fortunate in that our careers remained relevant in all that time. The economic collapse after the pandemic crisis always looked more serious to me, as it was forcing re-factoring of pretty much all aspects of our economy. Rather like bee hive colony collapse, where worker bees are forced to leave hives that look functional, but are actually sick. I’m worried that like bees fleeing a sick hive, we’ll have to flee our careers in the sick part of the economy, to find a healthier part. Do we have enough years in us to re-factor and still retire with all our debts wiped clean? Or will we be bequeathing our debts to our children? If we’re lucky enough to remain in our current careers, then probably yes. If we have to find a new hive, then possibly no.

What surprised me

New skills

I’ve enjoyed learning new skills. I really enjoy cooking, making use of knife skills, combining new flavours, but most of all, seeing my family eat the product of my labours. I enjoy learning Python, thinking within the structure that coding mandates, and can now create web sites, data visualisations, financial analyses. These might even be useful new skills.

Life slowing down

My to do list didn’t disappear. Every day, I look at it and wonder why I haven’t been able to just burn through it. But each day brought a new couple of things to get done, and my capacity to motor through the tasks diminished. My productivity slowed along with the pace of life. I don’t miss the pace, and I find the undiminished to do list an acceptable price.

Smaller world

Video conferencing has brought distant friendships closer. Some of my friendships have drifted due to lack of opportunity to nurture; people are abroad in different time zones, people are busy with their own lives, people had their quota of social interactions at (=quick drink after) work. When that stopped, we turned to video conferences, which turns out to be better. It’s more inclusive as you don’t have to be within physical reach, and it’s more convenient as you don’t have to worry about the last train home. However, it’s no replacement for a large-scale shared experience; I’ve been to a beer fest, a cinema festival and a football match and they were all insipid. However at the personal-scale, it really works.

Nature is uplifting

Sunshine spills into my study. Bird song and the susurration of wind is louder than traffic noise. The rambling rose over the arch is in full bloom of 80s pink. Bees are constantly examining the lavender. I can see a whole world through my study window. I had no idea that these simple quotidien events would have such a profoundly positive effect on my wellbeing.

The new normal

The UK government announced that further easing of lockdown measures will come into force from 4th July. This feels like the moment the country comes out of hibernation. We’re starting to plan again, to think about holidays, to encourage social growth. It feels good to feel positive again.

So what is DevOps anyway?

Those of you in software development probably already know the answer to this. I thought I did too. Then I found out I was wrong. [blog.mindrocketnow.com]

First the academic answer: according to https://aws.amazon.com/devops/what-is-devops/ 

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organisation’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity

So far so vague. Deliveroo also has a high velocity delivery service. Perhaps a better description of DevOps behaviours is from https://tnw.to/gT0J2  

DevOps aims to close the gap between what the client ordered and what the development team has delivered. There is an emphasis on short release cycles, iterative approach to design, and automation of repetitive steps. 

Which sounds a lot like Agile, doesn’t it? Like many, I thought that Agile was a way of aligning Product and Engineering together into one happily productive team, and DevOps extended this to include Validation and Operations. The promise of DevOps is by having one bigger happy team of Product Owners, Developers, Testers and Infrastructure Operations Engineers, we can get to safely deploying every minute, instantly measuring how much delight we’re giving our customers in real-time.

I have yet to see this harmony in my experience. Instead, I’ve seen that Agile Transformation turns out to be a power struggle between Product and Engineering, and DevOps extends the blast radius to include Operations. I’ve always thought that the conflict arises from a fundamental conflation of people’s roles as contributors to an outcome (“squads”) versus their role as being a subject matter expert (“tribes”). The former is how to build your MacGuffin as best as you can to address the market need, whereas the latter deals with ensuring your resources are what you need. 

Moreover, organisations are normally oriented around the latter, as only senior people are allowed to spend money = hiring and authorising budgets. Delivery teams are formed as a “matrix” with no line management accountability, and executives who should be resource managers instead become points of escalation for the products, because that’s where the action is. This will only work if there’s a strong common vision of what good likes. If not, you have people up and down the food chain trying to balance what’s good for the product versus what’s good for their line management within their own heads, which inevitably causes cognitive dissonance. 

The closest I experienced a true alignment between the organisation functions was when I was running both an ops and an engineering team concurrently, and I myself represented the product (an ops tool for assuring content through the media supply chain). It was a small team, but it achieved remarkable results. Looking back, I think it was effective because the close collaboration between Product, Engineering, Testing and Operations got us to the point that we had a very short distance between defining changes in theory and measuring success in the market (and using the learnings to define the next set of changes).

DevOps defines how that close collaborative culture should work. It’s a mindset, not a toolset. It’s not about deploying automation, but understanding how automation shortens the distance from change to market. It’s not about the Head of Product owning everything, but the product team empowered to own everything. So here’s my current definition:

DevOps is a codified culture of collaboration between Market, Product, Engineering, Testing and Operations.

I’ll continue working on this definition as I continue living it. 

What are your experiences of living the DevOps culture? Write to me in the comments.