Quality Assurance Failure, Ash was “just doing his job.”
ASH : You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? QA. QA is the perfect organism. Their structural perfection is matched only by their hostility. LAMBERT : You admire them. ASH : I admire their purity. Survivors… unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality. PARKER : Look, I am… I’ve heard enough of this, and I’m asking you to pull the plug.
[Ripley goes to disconnect Ash, who interrupts]
ASH : Last word. RIPLEY : What? ASH : I can’t lie to you about your chances, but… you have my sympathies.
I’ve been embroiled in so many “What is DevOps” discussions over the course of my career, that I found this one of the best pictural descriptions of what it means to be Development Operations.
Entire books and educational courses have been written to describe what DevOps is and what DevOps do.
DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.
How DevOps Works
Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed.” Sometimes, these two teams are merged into a single team where the engineers work across the entire application lifecycle, from development and test to deployment to operations, and develop a range of skills not limited to a single function.
In some DevOps models, quality assurance and security teams may also become more tightly integrated with development and operations and throughout the application lifecycle. When security is the focus of everyone on a DevOps team, this is sometimes referred to as DevSecOps.
These teams use practices to automate processes that historically have been manual and slow. They use a technology stack and tooling which help them operate and evolve applications quickly and reliably. These tools also help engineers independently accomplish tasks (for example, deploying code or provisioning infrastructure) that normally would have required help from other teams, and this further increases a team’s velocity.
In January 2018, I was hired by Invincea in Fairfax, VA, just as they were being bought by Sophos. Later that same year, they moved from Fairfax to Reston, VA.
In October 2019, Thoma Bravo made an offer to acquire Sophos which was accepted by the management team and approved by the EU.
On Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020, Thoma Bravo and Sophos made the joint management decision to reduce costs and expenses by severing engineering and management at several locations… one of which was our engineering team.
This morning feels surreal as I clean up, box up, update my resume, and prep for job hunting again. I am extremely thankful and honored for the wonderful team members I met while at Invincea/Sophos, and our friendships that endure.
This last year has been a roller coaster of interesting health issues (my Stage 4 Cancer of Mantle Cell Lymphoma) and interesting technologies (joining the Invincea and Sophos DevOps team). While I’ve been fairly active on Facebook and less active on Twitter, I’ve been meaning to collect all of my pictures, knowledge, and sharing of interesting things/events/technologies/thoughts on a single website.
With Tayledras, I’m hoping to bring my ideas to fruition, to share with others and see what new things they make. This is a dedicated webserver where I intend to use Ansible, Terraform, Git, Jenkins, Grafana, MySQL, MediaWiki, WordPress, and more to use, demonstrate, and advanced the technologies that I use as part of my job but less so at home or my personal web.
In addition to the cool technologies that make this possible, I’m also hoping to document and share my adventures in trying to overcome Mantle Cell Lymphoma, my love of family and our two Shetland Sheepdogs (Kiyomi and Toshiro), my efforts to practice and learn proficiency on the piano keyboard, my efforts to be a licensed Ham Radio Technician, and more! I truly do hope this to be a lively and interesting website.
