Success and Failure in Engineering: A Paradoxical Relationship

Last week Bronto was proud to once again host a Triangle DevOps event. This time we had special guest Dr. Henry Petroski speaking on the subject of Success and Failure in Engineering.

Working in a Culture of Trust

You’ve probably heard that building a healthy, thriving DevOps culture requires trust.  At first glance, the statement seems self-evident. Trust should be a part of any healthy team, DevOps or not. Surely we all trust each other enough to get the job done. Besides, it’s too difficult to get any real metrics on trust to be too concerned about it.

Trust is vital. Trust is perhaps the most critical component of a DevOps culture.  

DevOps: Year One

I had the pleasure of addressing the Triangle DevOps meetup group on the subject of DevOps: Year One. The target audience was anyone who has bought into the idea of DevOps transformation for their business, but wanted practical advice for how to get started.

With only an hour to speak, and so many great questions to answer, we barely got to scratch the surface. But we did get to talk about some specific practices that have helped the Systems Engineering team at Bronto to work much more effectively.

John Willis at Triangle DevOps, Hosted by Bronto

Here at Bronto, we’re very proud to support the local community in many ways. One of the facets of that spirit of community support is in hosting a number of meetup groups. One of the meetup groups that we’ve been hosting for over a year now is Triangle DevOps. We love this group so much that two members of our engineering team, Doug Hairfield and myself, actively help to keep the group running smoothly along with Mark Mzyk of Chef, Mark Imbriaco of Digital Ocean, and Nathan Walls of WebAssign. We often host the group’s meetings in our Thunderdome, which has a maximum capacity of 200 people.

Back in May, before this Engineering Blog was live, we were very proud to host John Willis who is the VP of Customer Enablement at Stateless Networks. John is an early adopter of DevOps, and has made tremendous contributions to shaping the conversation about DevOps, and informing the community of many of its true roots in Lean manufacturing. You might call him a global influencer in the field. He’s contributed to books, podcasts, blogs, and is commonly sought as a speaker at conferences. More than anyone else, he’s probably most responsible for interpreting the wisdom of W. Edwards Deming for the software industry. For our audience, he talked a good bit about his take on DevOps, on Network Engineering, and made a strong case for why he believes that Network Engineers should adopt the DevOps model.

Docker Meetup at Bronto

The June 2014 Triangle DevOps meetup was once again hosted at Bronto. This particular event was one for the books; it’s not only the most highly attended Triangle DevOps event ever, but the largest event ever hosted in Bronto’s Thunderdome! Additionally, this was the official kick-off for the Docker Raleigh meetup group. If attendance and engagement were any indication, technology professionals in Raleigh and Durham are very ready to learn more about Docker and how to leverage it for their own benefit. We were very fortunate to have Aaron Huslage from Docker come to speak to us on this topic.

Aaron Huslage begins with a brief introduction to Docker