You can’t afford not to do it — Test Driven Development (TDD) is the practice of writing test cases for the code you wish you had, and then writing the code to make them pass. It sounds counter intuitive. How do you write test cases for code that doesn’t exist yet? Hold that thought for a minute. When…

If you’re not doing dev… you’re just doing ops — DevOps Engineer seems to be a job title that causes a fair amount of confusion. Perhaps this is because it’s an anti-pattern. Apparently, a lot of companies think they can hire someone and suddenly become DevOps. They want to “change” without actually changing anything! (except to change the title of…

It depends on your definition of “duties” — This question almost always comes up when I present the culture of DevOps to customers. After I talk about cross-functional DevOps teams that are responsible to design, develop, build, deploy, and run their own applications they invariably ask, “How do you implement segregation of duties when developers have access to…

Docker containers all the way down — In my article Creating Repeatable Development Environments, I showed how I use Vagrant as an orchestrator and VirtualBox as a provider of virtual machines for creating consistent development environments for my students and development teams. That worked really well until Apple released their new 2020 Macs with Apple M1 Silicon…

Using Vagrant, VirtualBox, and Docker — Development teams are up against an age old problem: how do you ensure that your development environment is the same across all of the developers on the team? A less frequent but equally important problem is how long does it take to on-board a new developer to a project? Hours…