One of the big projects I was involved with in 2017 was to help plan and organize The Guide to IT Culture Change, the fifth volume in The Open Organization book series. Our team opened up the process and made the book completely in the open. We gathered 25 chapters from practitioners, industry leaders, and notable technologists to get their best practical advice for making culture changes in IT organizations. The project was a huge success when it was released in early June and continues to get new downloads every day.
The Guide to IT Culture Change project got me interested in DevOps and reignited my interest in culture change. I began my own journey into the world of DevOps. I started applying techniques from agile development into my own everyday practices, taking tasks out of my inbox and making Trello or Waffle.io cards. I went to my first DevOpsDays in Raleigh, N.C., and look forward to helping plan the next one for 2018.
Do you want more DevOps in 2018? Chris Short and I started building the Opensource.com DevOps Team. You'll start to see more articles about DevOps, ranging from practical how to's to open source tools and everything from talent to culture. Here's to sharing more DevOps stories in 2018 and having more readers (yes, you) join the team and share their stories.
Until then, let's take a look at Opensource.com's top 5 DevOps articles from 2017.
Top DevOps articles from 2017
5. 20 questions DevOps hiring managers should be prepared to answer
As we change the calendar to a new year, many people use this time to reflect on what they've accomplished and where they want their career to go. If a DevOps career is in your future, this article from Catherine Louis can help you prepare for your next DevOps interview.
4. What's the point of DevOps?
DevOps is really about three things: people, process, and tools. Anyone doing DevOps knows that the people and culture aspect is the hardest part. Matt Micene tells us why true culture change can help bridge the gaps in your organization, beyond just implementing a new tool.
3. 5 laws every aspiring DevOps engineer should know
If good engineers aspire to be great engineers, then Chris Short has these 5 rules they should be following. My favorite rule is about not limiting what's possible and limiting your assumptions. Short writes, "Remember, anything is possible. This means great solutions can end up in production as well as poor ones."
2. Ops: It's everyone's job now
If the past decade was about teaching sysadmins to write code, the next challenge will be teaching operations to software developers. Charity, an engineer and the co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb, makes a great argument for why "Ops is how you get stuff done."
1. Top 5 programming languages for DevOps
People love to debate what programming language is the best. That's one reason our most popular article was Chris Saunders' exploration of languages from Python to Go. See what other languages are being used to enable automation for Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) in DevOps.
Honorable mentions
In How containers and DevOps transformed Duke University's IT department, Chris Collins shares transitions happening in the IT department at Duke. It should be no surprise that this story is not just about infrastructure and sprawling virtual machines, but why culture change is critical.
In 10 must-read DevOps resources, Chris Short supplies us with the necessary reading material to guide your IT deparment, whether you're building up your DevOps team or just starting your organization's digital transformation. I only have a few of these checked off my list, so you know what I'll be reading in 2018.
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