There’s no equality in tech job market. Top candidates get swept up by FAANG while the majority of us are left with rookies or folks who never had the chance to grow the leg of their T. When I started Otomato I had the intention of building a community of true experts. Trouble is – the culture of skill-sharpening isn’t that easy to nurture. Especially when you’re focused on keeping your customers happy. (We make it our rule to never bill the customer for our learning) Two very promising young engineers left the team in the last couple of months. They both grew from juniors to very solid professionals. On one hand – I’m happy to see them ready for their next adventure. But they aren’t experts yet. So for me – there’s a goal unreached. The rest of us are learning every day. If you leave your screen at…

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Use Git (with Github, Gitlab or BitBucket) for Effective Communication

Here’s a situation I’ve encountered numerous times:

We’re interviewing an engineering candidate. Say they’ve finished a course, a bootcamp or even worked for 1-2 years. I give them a home assignment to check their coding abilities. Now – we always ask to submit the assignments as Github pull requests – this both makes it easier to review and provides a simulation of an actual collaborative workflow.

They submit their work – and that’s when I suddenly realize – they don’t know how to work with git!!!

I’ve stumbled upon this time after time, and finally decided it’s time to summarize my expectations in a post.

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As validated by this CD Foundation post – continuous deployment in cloud-native land is still not a solved problem. A number of tools exist, each covering a part of the terrain, each with its own quirks and idiosyncrasies.

This article won’t be a comparison of all the different tools out there. There are multiple sources for that online…

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I’m starting something new! And it’s a podcast of course. :))

DevOps Shorts is the show where we invite wonderful human beings to have a lightning-fast conversation about Devs, Ops and other Mythical Creatures. The show where each episode only lasts 15 minutes, and we are focused on asking only 3 questions. So it’s short and sweet? Why? Well, because if there’s one thing we know, it’s that great delivery comes in small batches. 

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Photo: Startup Stock Photos / Pexels

For the last 4 years I’ve been working with IT organizations – small and large – helping optimize the delivery processes, doing the ‘DevOps Transformation’. Collaborative IT work is challenging. The amount of software tools on the market – whether open-source or commercial – is overwhelming. Some companies start with restructuring their teams, others with modernizing the architecture. Most of them try to do both at the same time. And the outcomes are often mixed.

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I just finished reading the new book by Viktor Farcic called DevOps Paradox. It’s a departure from Victor’s previous writing which was mostly focused on DevOps tooling. In a way this book can be seen as an extension of his DevOps Paradox podcast.

Viktor is a notorious conference speaker and an all-round great communicator. And ‘DevOps Paradox’ is basically the outcome of him traveling around the world, catching the industry’s leading speakers, writers and thinkers, getting them into the corner and attacking them with uncomfortable questions.

With his main question being: “What the hell is DevOps?!”

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About a week ago, I wrote about Kosta Klevensky (the DevOps architect for Codefresh) joining forces with Otomato.
This has caused some misunderstanding, which I’d like to clear up. Our collaboration with Codefresh goes back a long way. 

Codefresh were one of my first customers when I went independent and I always enjoyed working with them.

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Konstantin Klevensky joins Otomato

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The Truth

There is a truth about continuous delivery that gets lost behind all the buzz. And the truth is that it is a lot like sex when you’re a teen – everybody talks about it, everybody thinks about it, everybody is preparing for it, but very few actually do it.

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How to Avoid Burnout and Overload by Correctly Measuring Your Engineering Team Capacity

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