Adventures in DevOps

Share Episode                           We sit down with Itacama CEO Pia Wiedermayer to discuss the absurdity of siloed QA, the disaster of AI-generated API tests, and why developers hate the word "quality." This time we are asking the age-old question: Who needs testers anyway? Pia and Warren discuss how to dismantle the toxic culture of isolated quality assurance.         We explore how the ghosts of waterfall development still haunt modern teams, creating silos where developers blindly throw unverified code over the wall and expect a separate QA department to magically inject quality. Included is the inevitable discussion on the psychological safety of hiding behind narrow job titles and why refusing to take collective ownership of a product is a guaranteed recipe for architectural failure.         Of course we can't adoiv commenting on the terrifying reality of replacing human intuition with automated hype. Pia shares a case study of a scale-up that aggressively pivoted to "full steam AI development," intentionally excluding both their Product Owner and QA from the entire experiment. Predictably, it did not end well, but we were able to laugh at the painful irony that an AI-accelerated project scheduled for four weeks ended up taking eight weeks, proving that simply generating code without human oversight just creates more sophisticated bottlenecks.         🎯 Picks:         Warren - Wason Selection Task on The Rest Is SciencePia - Book: The Culture Map

Share Episode                  Developers spend more than 50% of their time reading code, making it the single largest expense in software engineering. Despite this massive cost, the industry rarely discusses or optimizes how we read code. So we've brought in Tudor Girba, CEO at Feenk to help us rethink, just how software engineering should be done. Instead of relying on manual reading and generic text editors, teams must shift toward building deterministic, contextual tools to directly extract information and answer questions about their systems.         The suggested solution? Contextual and composable micro-tools writen by everyone focused on exposing just the right information at the right time. This creates the opportunity for structural interrogation of your solution.         And how many tools should we? We'll if one example of tool is testing, and 50% or more of your code can be tests, imagine what percentage of your software should be actually production related!         Most importantly, generic tools fall short, but where can we find how to build the right tools, listen in to find out....         💡 Notable Links:         ✨ Episode: IDE & Copilot & Critical ThinkingBook: Moldable software developmentWardley MapGuest Request: Formal Verification🎯 Picks:         Warren - The real stuff: Underwood Ranches SrirachaTudor - The beaches of Normandy

Share Episode                  "Those memes are not going to make themselves."         Dorota, CEO of Authress, joins us to roast the 2025 DORA Report, which she argues has replaced hard data with an AI-generated narrative. From the confusing disconnect between feeling productive and actually shipping code to the grim reality of a 30% acceptance rate, Warren and Dorota break down why this year's report smells a lot like manure.         We dissect the massive 142-page 2025 DORA Report. Dorota argues that the report, which is now rebranded as the "State of AI-Assisted Software Development", feels less like a scientific study of DevOps performance and more like a narrative written by an intern using an LLM prompt. The duo investigates the "stubborn results" where AI apparently makes everyone feel like a 10x developer, where the hard results tell a different story. AI actually increases software and product instability — failing to improve.         The conversation gets spicy as they debate the "pit of failure" that is feature flags (often used as a crutch for untested code) and the embarrassing reality that GitHub celebrates a mere 30% code acceptance rate as a "success." Dorota suggests that while AI raises the floor for average work, it completely fails when you need to solve complex problems or, you know, actually collaborate with another human being.         In a vivid analogy, Dorota compares reading this year's report to the Swiss Spring phenomenon — the time of year when farmers spray manure, leaving the beautiful landscape smelling...unique. The episode wraps up with a reality check on the physical limits of LLM context windows (more tokens, more problems) and a strong recommendation to ignore the AI hype cycle in favor of a much faster-growing organism: a kitchen countertop oyster mushroom kit.         💡 Notable Links:         AI as an amplifier truism fallacyDORA 2025 ReportDevOps Episode: VS Code & GitHub CopilotWhere is the deluge of new software - Impact of AI on software productsImpact of AI on Critical Thinking🎯 Picks:         Warren - The Maximum Effective Context WindowDorota - Mushroom Grow Kit

Share Episode ⸺ Episode Sponsor: Incident.io - https://dev0ps.fyi/incidentio                  Elise, VP and Head of UX at Unleash, joins us to talk all about UX. Self identifying as probably "The annoying lady in the room" and a career spanning nearly 30 years—starting before "UX" was even a job title — joins us to dismantle the idea that User Experience is just about moving pixels around. Here we debate the friction between engineering, sales, and the customer. We get to the bottom of whether or avoiding end-user interaction, understand, and research is a career-limiting move for staff+ engineers. Or should you avoid forcing a world-class developer to facilitate a call with a non-technical user if it makes them uncomfortable?         Warren calls out the "Pit of Failure" often faced by teams as they seek to introduce feature flags. They can become a crutch, leading teams to push untested code into production simply because they can toggle it off—a scenario he calls the "pit of failure".         And Elise dives into a great story recounting her consulting days where a company spent a fortune on a branding agency that demanded conflicting "primary colors" for a mainframe application used 8 hours a day. Her low-tech solution to prove them wrong? Listen and find out, this episode is all about bringing UX to Engineering.         💡 Notable Links:         Ladder of Leadership - Book: Turn the Ship Around!🎯 Picks:         Warren - Growth.Design Case StudiesElise - Paper on Generative UI: LLMs are Effective UI Generators

Share EpisodeMicrosoft's John Papa, Partner General Manager of Developer Relations for all things dev and code joins the show to talk developer relations...from his Mac. He reveals his small part in the birth of VS Code (back when its codename was Ticino) after he spent a year trying a new editor every month.The conversation dives deep into "Agentic AI," where John predicts developers will soon become "managers of agents". But is it all hype? John and Warren debate the risks of too much automation (no, AI should not auto-merge your PRs) and the terrifying story of a SaaS built with "zero handwritten code" that immediately got hacked because the founder was "not technical".The episode highlights John's jaw-dropping war stories from Disney, including a mission-critical hotel lock system (for 5,000+ rooms) that was running on a single MS Access database under a desk. It's a perfect, cringeworthy lesson in why "we don't have time to test" is the most expensive phrase in tech, and why we need a human in the loop. John leaves us with the one question we must ask of all new AI features: "Who asked for that?"💡 Notable Links:Impact of AI on Critical Thinking paperLLMs raise the floor not the ceilingDevOps Episode: How far along with AI are we?🎯 Picks:Warren - Shokz OpenFit 2John - Run Disney

Share Episode ⸺ Episode Sponsor: Attribute - https://dev0ps.fyi/attributeWe're joined by 20 year industry veteran and DevOps advocate, Adam Korga, celebrating the release of his book IT Dictionary. In this episode we quickly get down to the inspiration behind postmortems as we review some cornerstone cases both in software and in general technology.Adam shares how he started in the industry, long before DevOps was a coined term, focused on making systems safer and avoiding mistakes like accidentally dropping a production database. we review the infamous incidents of accidental database deletion, by LLMs and human's alike.And of course we touch on the quintessential postmortems in civil engineering, flight, and survivorship bias from World War II through analyzing bullet holes on returning planes.💡 Notable Links:Adam's book: IT DictionaryKnight Capital: the 45 minute nightmareWork Chronicles Comic: Will my architecture work for 1 Million users?🎯 Picks:Warren - Cuitisan CANDL storage containersAdam - FUBAR