Applying DevOps Principles to Side Projects
Some of the Things #13: Where I share some of the things I've been thinking about, learning about, and exploring across work, tech, wellness, and life.
If there’s one thing you know about me, it’s probably my passion for DevOps. I use DevOps practices to create high-performing, high-impact technology capabilities within enterprises. Two of my favorite DevOps principles are Make Work Visible and Limit WIP.
Make Work Visible is about creating a system for tracking all work - projects, defects, questions, admin tasks - everything. The idea being you can’t manage what you can’t see, and by writing it all down in one place you can make better decisions about what to work on, and just as important, what not to work on. (Book recommendation: Making Work Visible by Domnica DeGrandis)
Limit WIP (work in progress, work in process) comes from the Lean Manufacturing world and is about limiting batch size and focusing on end-to-end throughput. The smaller you work, and the less you have in process, the more you can produce. The best, or at least the most colorful, analogy I’ve heard for describing this principle is the toilet. Which is a better system: a toilet that flushes after each time you use it, or one that flushes once every week? (Book recommendations: The Goal by Eli Goldratt and The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim)
I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed lately with the number of side gigs and passion projects I’m working on. I recognize this feeling of being overwhelmed and stressed out as common symptoms of a system that would benefit from more DevOps. So I realized I should make my side projects visible by writing them down and then focusing on only one at a time.
Current Passion Projects
Writing a children’s book with my sister based on a Mongolian folk tale about a bat
Writing a short story for Philosophical Foxes
Coauthoring a paper for the DevOps Enterprise Journal
Helping organize the first unofficial Farcaster user conference in Boston June 10 -11. More info: farcon.xyz
Building an NFT project based on an art concept, but need to learn React and a few other things first
Launching a podcast with 3 of my college girl friends
VC & angel investing
Blogging
In addition to these projects, I’ve got my hands full raising 3 kids and growing my consulting business that was started just 6 months ago. Once I wrote this all down, it became pretty clear I needed to change my expectations, relentlessly prioritize and work smaller. I’m committed to getting these all done this year so stay tuned for updates!
Onto some of the things
As always, a short collection of just some of the things I’ve been doing, reading, and thinking about since my last update:
Landed a new client through word of mouth.
Speaking at DevOps Connect June 1 about DevOps for Business Operations.
Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, interviews Open AI CEO Sam Altman. In the conversation Sam talks about raising 9 figures before having a product. Can you imagine taking a hundred million dollars from investors and saying “maybe this will work, maybe it won’t”?
Top 7 Most-Used Distributed System Patterns - Super cool short video explaining different patterns used in distrubuted systems.
Google project starling offers a glimpse into the future. If zoom meetings exhaust you as much as they exhaust me, you might find this video interesting.
Knowing about grief on an intellectual level and the process of actually grieving are worlds apart.
A note to my subscribers:
Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here, or find me on twitter and farcaster.
Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️