Too Big, Too Small, Just Right

4 Weeks Incident

Hi,

What happens when software rots over decades?

More than I can list. The software has accumulated so many problems that they can’t be described compactly.

• The monitoring is incomplete
• The deployment is cumbersome
• The infrastructure is heterogeneous
• Libraries are outdated
• Knowledge has been lost
• Background and context for decisions are missing
• The code is tangled
• … and has high coupling

So far, this is not surprising. Maybe you have worked on such a project yourself.

Marcus Held

Agile

Hi,

Dave Thomas never tires of mentioning that “agile” is an adjective - and not a noun. It is not capitalized.

The legendary document we have been referencing for nearly a quarter of a century is not called “The Agile Manifesto.”

It is called the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” . 👈

Agile is not something that can be bought. The manifesto describes how to develop software in an agile (as an adjective!) manner. It does not describe a product.

Marcus Held

GitOps, SRE, DevOps - A Look Back and into the Future

Hi,

Ten years ago, most companies were still dealing with manually managed infrastructures. Today, many medium-sized businesses still find themselves in the same situation. But that comes at a cost - and I’m feeling it right now.

The Ghosts of Differences

It’s astonishing how often we chase ghosts simply because our environments differ. This ranges from obvious things like available CPU or RAM to subtler issues like different kernel versions or configuration disparities in applications. It gets especially tricky with external application servers, where configuration files are spread throughout the system and can easily drift apart.

Marcus Held

Scrum Is Not Agile

Hi,

In one of my client projects, we reflect on our working methods.

Like most mid-sized projects out there, Scrum is used here too. But we have a few problems: - Sprint goals are never met - Not a sprint goes by without a new task coming in from the side - Estimations are regularly far from reality - Collaboration with other external parties is partially not integrated - … I can certainly think of more examples

Marcus Held

Daily Practice

Hi,

Have you ever tried closing vim?

You probably know the meme. Even after decades, I still find it funny 😁

But what I haven’t managed to do in all these years is to seriously learn how to use vim. Sure, I press i to enter insert mode and then I can type. And I’ve also learned dd to delete a line. And yes, of course, I was one of the three million viewers who were helped by Stack Overflow to close vim 😉

Marcus Held