Technological Thoughts by Jerome Kehrli

A few years ago, I worked intensively on a pet project: AirXCell (long gone ...)
What was at first some framework and tool I had to write to work on my Master Thesis dedicated to Quantitative Research in finance, became after a few months somewhat my most essential focus in life.
Initially it was really intended to be only a tool providing me with a way to have a Graphical User Interface on top of all these smart calculations I was doing in R. After my master thesis, I surprised myself to continue to work on it, improving it a little here and a little there. I kept on doing that until the moment I figured I was dedicated several hours to it every day after my day job.
Pretty soon, I figured I was really holding an interesting software and I became convinced I could make something out of it and eventually, why not, start a company.

And of course I did it all wrong.

Instead of finding out first if there was a need and a market for it, and then what should I really build to answer this need, I spent hours every day and most of my week-ends developing it further towards what I was convinced was the minimum set of feature it should hold before I actually try to meet some potential customers to tell them about it.
So I did that for more than a year and a half until I came close to burn-out and send it all to hell.

Now the project hasn't evolve for three years. The thing is that I just don't want to hear about it anymore. I burnt myself and I am just disgusted about it. Honestly it is pretty likely that at the time of reading this article, the link above is not even reachable anymore.
When I think of the amount of time I invested wasted in it, and the fact that even now, three years after, I still just don't want to hear anything about this project anymore, I feel so ashamed. Ashamed that I didn't take a leap backwards, read a few books about startup creation, and maybe, who knows, discover The Lean Startup movement before.
Even now, I still never met any potential customer, any market representative. Even worst: I'm still pretty convinced that there is a need and a market for such a tool. But I'll never know for sure.

Such stories, and even worst, stories of startups burning millions of dollars for nothing in the end, happen every day, still today.

Some years ago, Eric Ries, Steve Blank and others initiated The Lean Startup movement. The Lean Startup is a movement, an inspiration, a set of principles and practices that any entrepreneur initiating a startup would be well advised to follow.
Projecting myself into it, I think that if I had read Ries' book before, or even better Blank's book, I would maybe own my own company today, around AirXCell or another product, instead of being disgusted and honestly not considering it for the near future.
In addition to giving a pretty important set of principles when it comes to creating and running a startup, The Lean Startup also implies an extended set of Engineering practices, especially software engineering practices.

This article focuses on presenting and detailing these Software Engineering Practices from the Lean Startup Movement since, in the end, I believe they can benefit from any kind company, from initiating startup to well established companies with Software Development Activities.
By Software Engineering practices, I mean software development practices of course but not only. Engineering is also about analyzing the features to be implemented, understanding the customer need and building a successful product, not just writing code.

So ... I've read a lot of things recently on DevOps, a lot of very interesting things ... and, unfortunately, some pretty stupid as well. It seems a lot of people are increasingly considering that DevOps is resumed to mastering chef, puppet or docker containers. This really bothers me. DevOps is so much more than any tool such as puppet or docker.

This could even make me angry. DevOps seems to me so important. I've spent 15 years working in the engineering business for very big institutions, mostly big financial institutions. DevOps is a very key methodology bringing principles and practices that address precisely the biggest problem, the saddest factor of failure of software development projects in such institutions : the wall of confusion between developers and operators.

Don't get me wrong, in most of these big institutions being still far from a large and sound adoption of an Agile Development Methodology beyond some XP practices, there are many other reasons explaining the failure or slippage of software development projects.
But the wall of confusion is by far, in my opinion, the most frustrating, time consuming, and, well, quite stupid, problem they are facing.

So yeah... Instead of getting angry I figured I'd rather present here in a concrete and as precise as possible article what DevOps is and what it brings. Long story short, DevOps is not a set of tools. DevOps is a methodology proposing a set of principles and practices, period. The tools, or rather the toolchain - since the collection of tools supporting these practices can be quite extended - are only intended to support the practices.
In the end, these tools don't matter. The DevOps toolchains are today very different than they were two years ago and will be very different in two years. Again, this doesn't matter. What matters is a sound understanding of the principles and practices.

Presenting a specific toolchain is not the scope of this article, I won't mention any. There are many articles out there focusing on DevOps toolchains. I want here to take a leap backwards and present the principles and practices, their fundamental purpose since, in the end, this is what seems most important to me.

DevOps is a methodology capturing the practices adopted from the very start by the web giants who had a unique opportunity as well as a strong requirement to invent new ways of working due to the very nature of their business: the need to evolve their systems at an unprecedented pace as well as extend them and their business sometimes on a daily basis.
While DevOps makes obviously a critical sense for startups, I believe that the big corporations with large and old-fashioned IT departments are actually the ones that can benefit the most from adopting these principles and practices. I will try to explain why and how in this article.