The promise

The promise or dreamland many CTOs have alluded to is leaning on the famous quote by Donovan Brown:

“The union of people, process and products to enable the continuous delivery of value to our end users”.

There is a lot to digest here.

As I interpret this, to me it tells me about a harmonious way of working, where everyone involved in delivering high quality software at speed, aligns themselves to best serve the need of the end user.

Sidney Dekker; Scientist, aviator & story teller

A couple of years ago during the 2017 DevOps Enterprise Summit professor Sidney Dekker took the stage. I was intrigued by the title of his talk : “The pursuit of success & drifting into failure”. He unveiled himself as scientist and an engaging story teller, who’s written a lot of books and made a movie. Through his scientific understanding of the World, he is able to distill essential messages from the field of safety science and convey these in layman’s terms. Through this talk I first discovered the impact this has on DevOps teams and getting work done. Let’s dig into a few details.

Bicep language

Late 2020 I got acquainted with the Bicep language when it was announced as “ready for production” with version 0.3. Immediately I started using it for a job at a customer and off the bat found the experience very pleasant. I was amazed at the ease and rate at which I could produce complex resource configurations.

Workshop

Over the past year I have given a few workshops for both colleagues at Microsoft and some of our customers to introduce bicep into their lives. For that I’ve created a workshop scenario you can find on my Github called A lap around bicep. Have a look if your looking for an introduction into the language and have prior experience building ARM templates.

Welcome

This is the first post so it obviously must contain the obligatory, sorry about that.

HelloWorld();

Getting started

So, I’ve finally followed getting started with Hugo and managed to get going. Not 100% easy, probably due to the fact that I’ve picked up a theme name Arabica that maybe was a out of date. Its quite nice ( after I’ve fixed it ).

What to expect here

Just a set of blog posts covering the things that I think are worthy of sharing. Topics you may find here:

Wardley Maps

Somewhere in 2016 I stumbled upon a conference video presented by a person named Simon Wardley ( @swardley ) hence the name Wardley mapping. He was telling the story of “crossing the river by feeling the stones” and it was fascinating to witness how this method of creating maps communicated so much understanding. That is even without fully understanding the capabilities you unlock with them.

Origins

The reason I bumped into the video is because I’ve been looking into the “OODA loop” famously formulated by John Boyd. In the world of DevOps this is also one of the ways we can iterate, learn and take deliberate action. Wardley mapping includes this concept but mixes it with a few other things, among which Sun Tzu “The art of War” in what I can only describe as great insight by Simon who fused this coherently together.