16
Mar 16

Extinguishing Burnout

2015 was the year that we saw the issue of systemic, professional burnout make its unfortunate entrance onto the stage of high technology and DevOps. In this episode, we interview the world’s foremost expert on burnout, Dr. Christina Maslach, a psychology professor and researcher at UC Berkeley about burnout, its causes and effects, and most importantly: what we can do about it. It’s been a year since a series of events started the conversation in our industry and it has all but died back down again. But for people, teams, and organizations struggling with burnout, it remains a critical issue for the industry to confront. Join the entire Ship Show Crew and Dr. Maslach for a very special episode of the podcast:

Extinguishing Burnout

Join J. Paul Reed, aka @jpaulreed, Youssuf El-Kalay, aka @buildscientist, EJ Ciramella, aka @eciramella Sascha Bates, aka @sascha_d Seth Thomas, aka @cheeseplus, Pete Cheslock, aka @petecheslock, J. Michael McGarr, aka @SonOfGarr, and Katherine Daniels, aka @beerops for the discussion, plus the last few of weeks in News & Views and a special end segments.

Or, download Episode 60, or any of our previous shows!

Show Links/Notes

An End Segment to End All End Segments

The crew takes a moment to reminisce on over three and a half years of The Ship Show.

Join Us!

What is the best strategy you’ve found, personally or with your team, to tackle burnout?

What was your favorite episode or moment of The Ship Show?

Join the discussion!


03
Dec 15

The DevOps Checklist Manifesto

The DevOps community has long resisted a push to define the movement via instruments like cookbooks or manifestos, creating an interesting thread of “lack-of-definition” when describing DevOps and DevOps practices. This issue has come to a head in 2015, as some proponents think we’re long overdue to provide a stronger framework around what DevOps actually means in practice. For episode 59, we sit down with the creator of the DevOps Checklist, Steve Pereira, to talk through the items on the checklist, whether or not it’s a good idea to even have a checklist, and debate the finer points of what could become:

The DevOps Checklist Manifesto

Join J. Paul Reed, aka @jpaulreed, Seth Thomas, aka @cheeseplus, and Pete Cheslock , aka @petecheslock, for the discussion, plus a the last couple of weeks in News & Views and a Tool Tip!

Or, download Episode 59, or any of our previous shows!

Show Links/Notes

Tool Tip

Paul introduces the team to batsh.org, a meta-compiler for all your scripting needs!

Join Us!

How does your organization score on the DevOps Checklist?

What changes would you make to the checklist?

Join the discussion!


05
Oct 15

We May Have DevOps, But Does Ops Have the Dev?

Back in 2013, Pager Duty’s Ranjib Dey surmised that it would take ages for traditional operations teams to learn and adopt mainstream development technologies. The opinion sparked quite a lively discussion around what those mainstream development technologies are, what hurdles exist for operations team to adopt them, and whether it all would be as glacial as Dey guessed. For Episode 58, we welcome Ranjib to the show for a panel discussion to revisit the tweet and look to see if anything has improved in the last 2 years. Join the panel as we parse through the puzzle of:

We May Have DevOps, But Does Ops Have the Dev?

Join J. Paul Reed, aka @JPaulReed, Youssuf El-Kalay, aka @buildscientist, Seth Thomas, aka @cheeseplus, and J. Michael McGarr, aka @SonOfGarr for the discussion, plus a the last couple of weeks in News & Views and another Tool Tip!

Note: the audio levels on this episode were not set quite correctly; we’re aware of the issue and will fix it for the next episode. Apologies for the poor quality.

Or, download Episode 58, or any of our previous shows!

Show Links/Notes

Tool Tip

Youssuf introduces us WireMock, a powerful Java-based tool for mocking out network APIs.

Join Us!

How long do you think it will take for mainstream development practices to be one in the same with mainstream operations practices.

How have you gotten your team to become more dev-like (or more ops-like)?

Join the discussion!


11
Aug 15

Managing the CommunityOps

So many of the companies who build the tools we use daily take special care to cultivate and nurture a community of users. But that doesn’t just happen magically. For episode 57, we sit down with community managers from Chef, Perforce, and VictorOps to talk to them about their experiences building community, the difficulties with community engagement, getting the business to see the value, and what community is really made of. Join us as we talk to the folks responsible for…

Managing the CommunityOps

Join J. Paul Reed, aka @SoberBuildEng, Youssuf El-Kalay, aka @buildscientist, and Pete Cheslock , aka @petecheslock for the discussion, plus the last couple of weeks in News & Views and another Tool Tip!

Or, download Episode 57, or any of our previous shows!

Show Links/Notes

Tool Tip

Paul introduces us to GitQL, an SQLite-backed interface to search your Git repositories!


Join Us!

What experiences has your company had with building and nurturing a community?

What do you wish community managers did more of?

Join the discussion!


25
Jun 15

We Monitor the Monitorama

If DevOps is CAMS—culture, automation, metrics, and sharing—then it makes sense there’d be a conference on monitoring and metrics…and there is: Monitorama! In episode 56, the crew gets together with Jason Dixon , aka @obfuscurity, the founder of Monitorama to talk about the fourth incarnation of the conference. We do a deep dive into what all is encompassed when we say “monitoring,” why monitoring really isn’t about CPU load and memory, other things you can monitor, and why Paul was stupid for not coming to Monitorama earlier; join us, the crew, as…

We Monitor the Monitorama

Join J. Paul Reed, aka @SoberBuildEng, Youssuf El-Kalay, aka @buildscientist, EJ Ciramella, aka @eciramella Seth Thomas, aka @cheeseplus, Pete Cheslock, aka @petecheslock,
and Katherine Daniels , aka @beerops for the discussion, plus a the last couple of weeks in News & Views and a
fresh Tool Tip!

Episode 56 is sponsored by
Pager Duty!

Or, download Episode 56, or any of our previous shows!

Show Links/Notes

Tool Tip

EJ introduces us to Convection, a modular DSL for AWS Cloud Formation.


Join Us!

What comes to mind when you hear the word monitoring? #monitoringlove or #monitoringsucks?

What’s your best monitoring story?

Join the discussion!


20
Apr 15

I Don’t Always Test, But When I Do…

Do you test? Do you want to test? For many operations and build/release engineers (and even some developers!), testing can be a bit of a foreign concept. It’s hard to pay attention to getting to 100% code coverage on your unit tests for your inrastructure cookbooks and manifests when the infrastructure is on fire! But… maybe that’s why it’s on fire? For this episode, Mike McGarr walks us through the nuts and bolts of testing, so we can all become better testers, and start integrating testing into our workflows, even if we’re not developers. Join us for:

I Don’t Always Test, But When I Do…

Join J. Paul Reed, aka @SoberBuildEng, Seth Thomas, aka @cheeseplus, Pete Cheslock , aka @petecheslock, J. Michael McGarr, aka @SonOfGarr, and Katherine Daneils, aka @beerops for the discussion, plus a the last couple of weeks in News & Views and a special O’Reilly guest!

Episode 55 is sponsored by
Pager Duty!

Or, download Episode 55, or any of our previous shows!

Show Links/Notes

A Special Guest

Paul and Courtney Nash, O’Reilly’s Director of Strategic Content and Velocity Conference tri-chair, discuss the thematic changes for Velocity Conference.

Join Us!

What is your relationship with testing?

What’s the best story where a unit or acceptance test totally saved your bacon?

Join the discussion!


16
Mar 15

Packaging Your Software for Maximum Freshness

It’s a part of software developers hate writing and operations teams hate dealing with: packaging, installers, and upgrade scenarios. In Episode 54, the team looks at the fundamentals of packaging, tools that make the job both harder and easier, installer horror stories, and some good practices to make sure your packages don’t make others want to rip their hair out. Join the crew as we provide some tips for:

Packaging Your Software for Maximum Freshness

Join J. Paul Reed, aka @SoberBuildEng, Youssuf El-Kalay, aka @buildscientist, Seth Thomas, aka @cheeseplus, Pete Cheslock , aka @petecheslock and J. Michael McGarr, aka @SonOfGarr for the discussion, plus a the last couple of weeks in News & Views and a new Tool Tip!

Episode 54 is sponsored by
Pager Duty!

Or, download Episode 54, or any of our previous shows!

Show Links/Notes

Tool Tip

Paul introduces us to Gitrob, a tool to help keep your really-private data out of your Git repos.

Join Us!

How do you package your bits?

What’s the weirdest installation or upgrade problem you’ve ever run into?

Join the discussion!


05
Feb 15

Developing CareerOps

It’s been awhile, but we’re finally back, and special guest Katherine Daniels (aka @beerops) is with us to talk over career development in a DevOps context! We discuss All The Things related to leveling up your career, including specialization vs. generalists, training and learning (especially if you don’t have a degree in computer sciency things), and some techniques you can employ to make sure your career doesn’t stagnate! Join us as we delve into:

Developing CareerOps

Join J. Paul Reed, aka @SoberBuildEng,

EJ Ciramella, aka @eciramella, Sascha Bates, aka @sascha_d, J. Michael McGarr, aka @SonOfGarr, and Katherine Daniels, aka @beerops for the discussion, plus the month in News & Views and a brand new Tool Tip!

Or, download Episode 53, or any of our previous shows!

Show Links/Notes

Tool Tip

Paul introduces us to Scott Muc and Subhas Dandapani’s DevOpsBookmarks.com; some hilarity ensues.

(See also: O’Reilly’s similar developer field guide.)


Join Us!

What do you do to make sure your career doesn’t stagnate?

Join the discussion!


21
Jan 15

Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

The topic of diversity in the technology and software development industries has been important to The Ship Show co-hosts ever since our first episode. It’s also one we hope our audience is interested in as well or, at least, aware of.

In 2014, we announced our Ship Show Diversity Program.

It was an experiment to find a way to help improve the state of diversity within our industry. It focused on increasing the attendee diversity of the various tech conferences in the “build engineering, DevOps, release management, and everything in between”-space.

It was something new for us. We fumbled a bit. We made a few mistakes.

It didn’t quite work out the way any of us had envisioned, at least not entirely.

But we learned a lot.

And we were able to help some individuals attend tech conferences. So by at least that measure, we were somewhat successful.

But at the end of the year, when we looked back at what we’d intended and envisioned and what we were able to do, we didn’t feel we had done enough.

So the co-hosts discussed it and we decided The Ship Show should make up the difference by donating to various organizations.

These organizations all do really important, on-the-ground work to improve our industry’s diversity story; we were able to donate over $2,000 in total to:

In 2015, The Ship Show plans to continue working on trying to improve the state of diversity within our industry.

And we’ll continue refining the diversity program we started in 2014, trying to make it better serve the needs of our listeners, our community, and our industry.

This is our 2015 resolution.

(Our other resolution is to get a new podcast out; it’s on its way, we promise!)

Oh, and Happy New Year!


22
Nov 14

Managing the Magic of Microservces

When looking at all the organizations that are doing interesting technological, cultural, and scaling things in the DevOps space, one of the common architectural patterns is the use of microservices. For episode 52, the panel sits down to talk a bit about microservices: what they are, the benefits they provide, the costs, the issues around releasing, deploying, and operating microservices-based applications, in an attempt to figure out whether they’re the future or a fad and what, exactly, should make you pay attention and start investigating whether that old monolithic application should be sliced and diced into a microservice-utopia. Join us as we talk through:

Managing the Magic of Microservices

Join J. Paul Reed, aka @SoberBuildEng, EJ Ciramella, aka @eciramella Seth Thomas, aka @cheeseplus, and Youssuf El-Kalay, aka @buildscientist for the discussion, plus a the last couple of weeks in News & Views and a lil’ art!

Episode 52 is sponsored by
Pager Duty!

Or, download Episode 52, or any of our previous shows!

Show Links/Notes

Some Tech Art

We had a poet among us and didn’t even know it!

Submit your own tech haiku to us by 11:59 pm PST November 30th, via @ShipShowPodcast or crew@theshipshow.com; we’ll select one to receive a special prize!

Join Us!

Are you investigating converting your application to a microservices-architecture?

If you already use microservices, what problems and issues have you encountered?

Join the discussion!