Within Tools and Weapons is a treasure trove of knowledge about how to appropriately balance the exhilarating speed, agility, and enabling power of technical innovation with the important aspects of protecting human rights and working towards the benefit of society. Brad Smith comes from a background as a lawyer and general counsel of Microsoft where he has helped navigate many complex legal and ethical issues for the company and the tech sector as a whole. He has had a front row seat to complex world issues and has met and worked with leaders the world over. He has also worked hard to stay connected to the vast and unique users of not only the technology supplied by Microsoft but groups worldwide. This post is part of a series where I give some of my thoughts and takeaways from Tools and Weapons. ...

KUBERNETES: In the quest to further abstract the technology stack and help developers deploy and scale their applications better than ever, I present to you Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a leader in the technical segment of container orchestration and is designed to be run on many types of platforms and runtimes. As one of the top contributed to projects on GitHub, Kubernetes is an open-source wonder having spun off from the Borg project at Google. Kubernetes is written in Golang and is used by companies such as Capital One, eBay, and Spotify. ...

The Unicorn Project is written as a quasi-sequel to the widely popular book, The Phoenix Project. This book is written in the third person (whereas the Phoenix Project is written in the first-person point of view of Bill Palmer) and follows the adventures of Maxine, a rockstar developer with years of experience pushing critical code into production. Maxine works on a team that manages some critical control systems for Parts Unlimited, a major auto part manufacturer. However, when a critical system goes down she is left holding the bag and is exiled to the all so dreaded Phoenix Project, an initiative designed to bring Parts Unlimited into the eCommerce age. She arrives there right as Bill Palmer shows up to the scene as well. ...

I recently finished reading “The Phoenix Project” written by Gene Kim, Kevin Bahr, and George Spafford. This book is a must read for anyone trying to wrap their heads around the buzzword DevOps. The story follows a man named Bill who works for a company called Parts Unlimited (basically just insert any generic Fortune 500 here). He manages a department in his company’s IT apparatus and likes what he does. One day, without warning, he is unexpectedly promoted to Vice President of IT Operations. Long story short, Parts Unlimited is having some serious financial problems and the future success of the company rests on the rollout of a special initiative to establish an effective e-commerce presence, dubbed The Phoenix Project. Bill is tasked with the successful rollout of Phoenix, as well as putting out almost daily, technical fires. ...