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Showing posts from June, 2017

Democratizing Innovation and more at my upcoming talks!

I am no product visionary, but I've always strongly believed that if you democratize innovation by removing most barriers between idea and execution, you have a greater chance of building something customers love. The idea is to let developers (and everyone else) freely express themselves through the products and services they build (essentially creating intrapreneurs), so they come to work everyday wanting to change the world! This is something I tried doing after joining Yahoo about three years ago: I interviewed a ton of engineers; found their pain points (i.e. barriers); found my partners in crime and been on a journey to eliminate most of those barriers (both technical and cultural). The macro goal? Velocity: rapid experimentation ("ship fast"), coupled with rapid invalidation of things your users don't care about ("fail fast"). Come find out the challenges faced, the insights, and the lessons learned at one of  my upcoming talks: "DevOps Enterp

My upcoming talks at Velocity and SREcon.

Humbled, honored, grateful, and excited about the opportunity to speak at O'Reilly Velocity (@velocityconf) - London, in Oct (I am also speaking at USENIX @SREcon - Dublin, Ireland, in Aug). The idea that I am trying to spread through these talks is simple: aligning the incentives between the core development teams and the support functions which enable those teams to do their jobs effectively leads to better outcomes -- usually in the form of improved Velocity and Reliability. Why pick a talk specifically on Monitoring? Well, over-monitoring and alert fatigue is a real problem that plagues several industries; not just tech. As you know, telemetry monitors and their (constant) beeping is a pretty common sight in hospitals. In fact, I saw these at the NICU where my twins were being cared for after being born prematurely. My wife and I used to freak out every time one of these went off. Unlike a missed alarm that said your site's down, failing to act on an alarm at a hospital c