It’s a week now since I came back from O’Reilly’s Velocity conference in San Jose so I’ve had a chance to let some of the thoughts settle in my mind. I attended both the main conference and the workshops the day before.

Attending a large tech conference is a great way of getting up to speed with the latest technical themes and meet some great people. Velocity’s three days long, but tacked on the end was DevopsDays – a more informal meet-up of people interested in bringing the traditionally separate roles of development and operations together. Devops was also an important theme at Velocity. Or, as Theo Schlossnagle said in his Velocity keynote on careers… it’s really about *ops. Whatever technology you build, that software’s delivering a service, and whatever that service, it must operate. Or to put it from another way Theo was saying that we should treat ‘operability like security’.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been working within the platform team at Talis. We’re a small team, but have a lot we want to build and manage. Trying to organise ourselves in a devops is something really important to the way we work. Personally, I’ve never felt comfortable with the traditional ‘throw it over the wall’ relationship between software and operations teams. I’ve worked in a number of different kinds of teams before, usually I’ve tried to be a developer who works closely with ops, but I’ve definitely fallen into the us and them trap from time to time. Like agile, devops is not a magic formula, but I definitely feel much more comfortable with everyone being part of the same team.

I’ve decided to blog some of my thoughts/notes from the conference: the posts should start to appear very soon.