Through the Stack 2-05 (Week 10)

The last few weeks have been a forced break on this newsletter. After a year of publishing, I wondered about its type of content and format. I was not happy with the results. The lack of growth might be related to many things, but to, be honest I think the content wasn't good enough to be of much interest.

So, let's be a bit more raw, still focusing on topics that can be of help to Tech Leads and CTOs but with fewer links and more depth.

Pier 22's life

As mentioned late last year, "Pier 22" is now the brand we will use most. So here is what we have been doing.

Toulouse.rb

Last month marked the new start of our local Ruby user group: Toulouse.rb. Many years ago, I was the main promotor and organizer for the group. After returning to France in 2017 we did a few events but there was little traction back then.

So a few weeks ago, we had the first event of the year. Sêmeia, a company with part of its tech team in Toulouse, hosted the event, and its CTO even gave a talk on their stack. I also gave a little talk on Web frameworks written in Ruby. You can find the slides in the comments of the event.

If you are from Toulouse and interested, you can head to the newly created slack server.

RSpec

We are rolling out a series of posts on testing and RSpec. You can find all the series as it's published in the RSpec category of this site.

RSpec is an excellent solution for writing tests for Ruby projects. We have trained several teams to use it, and those articles are based on those training sessions.

We also rolled out an Ebook; you can sign up for a copy here. It's free (until April 4th) and packed with enough to get started and also to get familiar with some more advanced features.

This week ...

Now let's look into what caught my eye.

I have spent some time reading and taking notes from the "State of DevOps Report" (2022). I linked to one issue last year. I would encourage you to read the 2021 and 2022 reports. There is a lot to take in from a tech leadership point of view and an executive point of view.

There is a lot to unpack, actually, but I want to talk about a few parts:

• the importance of CI/CD
• the importance of context when making recommendations
• the general link that seems to be between highly performant organizations and the adoption of DevOps practices

Importance of CI/CD

Within the report, it's reported, again this year, that the adoption of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery is a major factor in helping other parts of good practices to be adopted.

It affects several aspects, but it sure seems to help with high software delivery performance, the adoption of security good practices, and code quality.

The general idea is that because it removes hurdles to run security and quality checks (for example), teams are more likely to adopt them.

So if you don't have an easy-to-use and adopt CI/CD pipeline, you should really think about it.

Context and recommendations

Within the 2022 report, there is this little snippet:

The research model shifted this year to better reflect a theory underlying DORA: there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach to DevOps. In practice, we've found that making recommendations involves understanding a team's broader context. A practice that is beneficial to one team might be detrimental to another team. – Accelerate State of DevOps 2022 (page 20).

This is great to read this. While most of our clients are startups under 10 years of age, that's not the case for all of them. While most of them have to handle thousands, if not more, of requests per second on one or more backends, that's not the case for all of them. What we can advise and set up for one might not be appropriate for another.

In a way, that's also a hint towards people who might want to force one framework of practices or another upon teams in the same way.

Highly performant organizations and DevOps practices

Let's start with a quote from the report:

Teams that recognize the need to continuously improve tend to have higher organizational performance than those that don't. – Accelerate State of DevOps 2022 (page 7).

The theme comes up a few times throughout the report and the authors linked that to Westrum's Organizational Culture typologies. This might be quite important to read up for CTOs, Tech Leads, and people aspiring to become either. The report does a nice synthesis of the paper linked above but one should give the paper a read or two.

To complement both the report and the research paper, I'd recommend glancing at Google Cloud's "DevOps capabilities". It covers, in-depth, many of the points covered by the State of DevOps reports:

The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team has identified and validated a set of capabilities that drive higher software delivery and organizational performance. These articles describe how to implement, improve, and measure these capabilities.

Wrapping up

That'll be all for this week: news about the company and a specific spotlight on a topic that has been on my screens actively these last few weeks.

As always, feel free to reach out with comments, questions and related content that might be of interest.

Who are we, by the way?

This content is written and published by Imfiny/Pier22, a consulting company based in France. We help CTOs and Tech Leads grow their engineering team and stack.