On our podcast this week, we get a chance to chat with one of my good friends Abel Wang from Microsoft. This one was so GOOD we had to stretch it out into three parts to make it fit our podcast. You’re gonna love it!

(Click the links here for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)

I love the energy Abel brings to the table, and his background as a serious coder makes his advice both pragmatic and spot on. He’s a fantastic speaker as well, if you’ve ever had the chance to catch him at a conference. (Check out his latest from Build 2018!) He wrote the foreword to my book, and with our conversation we got a chance to revisit some of the things we love most about DevOps and where we see the movement going in the future.

A little bit about Abel – he’s a Senior Cloud Developer Advocate specializing in DevOps and Azure with a background in application development. He is currently part of Donovan Brown’s League of Extraordinary Cloud DevOps Advocates. Before joining Microsoft, Abel spent seven years as a Process Consultant and a Certified Scrum Master helping customers globally develop solutions using agile practices and Team Foundation Server. Prior to that, Abel founded and sold his own software company. Abel’s a lifelong coder and I think you’ll find this conversation very interesting… We cover a lot of ground in this episode, so much so that I split our talk into three parts.

Part 1 includes the question that got Abel first thinking about DevOps, how to get CXO buyin, the power of one success story, the #1 pitfall he sees with change efforts, and do we really need QA?

• [1:00] – How little habits build up to success
• [2:24] – The question that got Abel thinking about DevOps (why do some projects succeed and others fail?)
• [6:30] – Getting CXO/director buy-in
• [10:20] – All you need is one team, one success – it catches on like wildfire!
• [13:20] – Start with what hurts the most! And Abel’s #1 rule for success
• [17:55] – Do we really still need that QA department?
• [19:26] – Knowing what we don’t know, and experimenting.

 

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Links to live by:

• Abel’s killer blog, one of my personal faves: https://abelsquidhead.com/
• How do we get Azure DevOps pipelines to deliver microservices? – https://abelsquidhead.com/index.php/2019/01/03/how-to-best-use-azure-devops-release-pipelines-with-microservices/
• What about getting code metrics exposed as part of your builds? – https://abelsquidhead.com/index.php/2019/04/28/getting-code-visual-studio-code-analysis-and-code-metrics-in-an-azure-pipeline-build-part-1/ –
• An interview with Abel from Feb 2018 where he raves about LaunchDarkly and the subversive power of feature flags: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2018/02/02/advanced-devops.aspx
• What is Dynatrace, and how can it help us create “bulletproof”, self-healing release pipelines? https://abelsquidhead.com/index.php/2018/08/03/the-dynatrace-unbreakable-pipeline-in-vsts-and-azure-bam/#comment-7795 – dynatrace and unbreakable pipelines.
• …and a brand new 8-part release from Channel 9 on DevOps for .NET peeps: https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/On-NET/DevOps-For-ASPNET-Developers-Pt1-What-is-DevOps