I’ve recently started working on a book, and have rediscovered that if you don’t exercise on a regular basis, it sucks to start. I need to think of this blog as an opportunity to get my regular writing “steps in”, so that when the time comes to actually start running, I’m ready.
One of the challenges I’m having is articulating my thoughts on the concept of “people first” in DevOps. It’s the first element in Donovan Brown’s definition, and embedded in the first value of the agile manifesto, but yet, people don’t get it. I was recently involved in a Facebook conversation on the evolution of graph databases, and was saddened by the fact that many people who I know and respect still see an ongoing war between developers and DBA’s (and often make assumptions about the other camp).
I may be naive, but I’m trying to find the good in people, and trying to build value to customers. Different roles and skills are necessary, but allowing those roles to foster tribalism to the detriment of the goal is a futile pursuit.
More to come.
Staring at the blank page is so damn hard. My favorite quotes:
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” Ernest Hemingway
“Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.” Stephen King
It works really well for me. Come up with the one true sentence, and the inspiration flows out of that. Sometimes you hang the entire post on that one sentence, and sometimes the sentence just ends up slipped in somewhere almost as an aside.
For “How to Think Like the Engine,” the sentence was, “SQL Server stores data in 8KB pages.” Then everything flowed off of that – lemme show you what the pages look like, lemme show you how to access those pages, lemme show you how to read less pages while you work, etc. That one sentence anchored everything, and anytime I got stuck, I went back to that sentence. It reminded me of other things that I needed to write about.
Come up with one true sentence about “people first” and it’ll be so much easier. “People first” doesn’t mean a damn thing by itself, and that’s probably why it’s so hard. It’s like “8KB pages” – it’s close, but it’s not the full sentence. You need a fully structured sentence. (I tried just now for a couple of minutes, and I couldn’t get there either.)