Great interview with Nathen Harvey – I sat down with him again after a year or so, back when he was at Chef. I love that guy and he’ll continue to rise in our industry! I knew I’d found a goldmine the first time I talked with Nathen, way back a year ago… He has so much practical experience around configuration management – he was a longtime employee at Chef and rocked a lot of great presentations. A very engaging and stimulating guy – you’ll love it. I think you’ll love this discussion, which explores some of the topics we covered in his interview in Achieving DevOps!

A link to the interview is here – and it’s on the podcast platform of your choice. Apple, Google, Spotify, blah blah…. Click below to check out the podcast. We’re on all the major platforms now, including Anchor, Apple, Google, Spotify, PocketCasts, and RadioPublic.

Here’s some of the topics we covered:

• So there’s a few Git flavors out there when it comes to branching – gitFlow, Github-flow, Gitlab-flow, etc. What do you favor? (And how long lived can a feature branch be anyway before it becomes an antipattern?)
• How do you build up empathy between different roles – i.e. engineering and Operations/IT?
• In the dawning era of containers and provisioning tools like Terraform – do we really still need configuration management tools like Chef, Ansible, etc?
• Let’s say we want to start up a DevOps Dojo – a POC. Where do we start? (i.e. why is a Hello World project not enough to get traction…)
• How do we get executive buy-in?
• What’s resilience engineering, and why is that important?

Enjoy the podcast!

 References and Links

• LinkedIn: Link up with Nathen on LinkedIn
• Websites: visualcv.com/nathenharvey  (My VisualCV), customink.com  (Company Website)
  
• Twitter: nathenharvey
• No more Horse Manure – blow up the silo! A 2.5 minute video from Nathen that always makes me laugh. ChefConf 2015: DevOps Explained – No Horse Manure. Check out those fancy million dollar special effects!!!
• How Microsoft handles release management and Git, and another view here
• Scott Hanselman – Dark Matter Developers