Show notes
Matty talks with Jessica Kerr, a developer for 19 years living in St. Louis, who works at Atomist and co-hosts the Greater Than Code podcast. The two met at re:Deploy, where Jessica spoke on symmathesy, and the episode follows a week when Jessica was track chair for the DevOps track at QCon San Francisco and Matty sat on a panel there. The cold open is Jessica: "I have opinions about DevOps."
How Jessica Got Into Software
Jessica wanted a steady paycheck and the ability to work in any city, and a college internship at FedEx in operations research, programming in ArcInfo to make maps, showed programming was doable, with no homework at 5:30. Grad school in physics offered a long road to job security, while a developer could earn more right away. The motives were selfish, Jessica says, but now software and automation are what Jessica thinks about in spare time.
Development Automation
At Atomist, which Jessica joined almost two years earlier, the work is development automation, in which Jessica studies the domain of software development itself. Jessica is reading the Domain-Driven Design book. Everyone needs their own delivery automation, but not everyone can have a team devoted to it like Netflix, Stripe or Facebook, and Atomist's service does triggering and event correlation for event-driven delivery choreography. Matty likes the word choreography, which Matty once suggested on the show in place of orchestration, and Jessica says "when the world is ready for an idea, it doesn't come to just one person."
Asking Better Questions
Asked how the practice of software could be better, Jessica says "we don't know what we're doing yet," and there are no universal laws or silver bullets: not everyone is Netflix, so not everyone should use Spinnaker, but everyone needs their own automation system. Teams learn by asking better questions. From re:Deploy, Jessica takes the safety questions: not only what made this fail, but "what made this succeed? What made it not worse? What keeps this system together at all?" Also who keeps it running and what matters to them. Matty adds the question of how your company makes money, and Jessica adds that staying profitable is a necessary condition, but "Profit as an aim is not interesting or useful." Matty says deploying 13,000 times a minute is no use if the business isn't changing at that rate, and Jessica adds that software shipped as a part may be updated every few years. Jessica cautions against asking how to go faster, since "that's a destructive question," and asking how to go smoother instead.
What the Industry Does Well
Jessica says the industry is thinking about systems and teams, and excitedly notes non-software businesses learning from Agile: letting a team become a learning system and influence the organization turns paperwork into knowledge work. Software lets us create, modify and study very complex systems in days and weeks, not lifetimes, which makes us better at systems thinking. Jessica adds that humans are wired to track relationships, and we're learning to do that with software.
Symmathesy
Matty asks Jessica to explain the word from the re:Deploy talk. Symmathesy, Jessica says, is more specific than system, which suggests a mechanical thing that could in principle be predicted: it is "a learning system made of learning parts," where the relationships between the parts keep changing because the parts learn from each other and the whole. An ecosystem is one, as is a team or an organization, and a learning team can't avoid influencing the organization. Jessica has a short blog post with the summary.
QCon and Conferences
Jessica was track chair for QCon's DevOps track, after an earlier experience hosting the frontend track, which felt awful because Jessica is a backend developer. Jessica says "Software delivery is not a nuisance. It's not something that's in the way of your job. It is your job," and "We don't write code. We operate useful software." Jessica compares QCon, structured and practical, with Code Mesh in London, which is informal and opinionated and curated by the program committee. Matty, at a first QCon, says some of the theme language like engineers over evangelists felt exclusionary, and Jessica agrees it's the "tech rules the world thing." Matty praises the track, including the opening keynote by Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble, and Jessica notes QCon speakers are invited, so tweeting about wanting to speak got Baron Schwartz into the track with a talk on DevOps for the database.
Greater Than Code
Jessica says the podcast is "we talk to technologists about things more important than technology." It started when the panel of a Ruby podcast lost its editor, Mandy, and started a new show around Mandy, aiming for a more diverse set of panelists. Matty notes Mandy was the first editor of Arrested DevOps. Jessica says all episodes are transcribed, and being a panelist means showing up for an hour and a half to talk to someone interesting. Matty says Arrested DevOps is more like putting on a podcast in the barn with no schedule, and Jessica calls that continuous delivery: "you make a podcast when you have a podcast."
Learning and Sharing
Jessica's career took off seven years earlier with speaking. Jessica liked being on stage but didn't feel like an expert, then learned "you don't have to be an expert in anything. You just have to learn enough to talk about it for an hour." Jessica's advice is to pick several topics you'd like to learn, submit abstracts, and build only the ones accepted, giving you a deadline and incentive, or give them at user groups first. Blogging stays around and lasts longer. "Learning begets community, which begets learning and new ideas," and the sharing makes it geometric instead of logarithmic.
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