Brownfield

GitLab released a dozen page book about Git Branching Strategies to serve as a high-level overview of branching strategies and how they work.

One of GitLab’s strengths is creating productivity-boosting constraints that positively impact system architecture and DevOps cycles. This is very clear in the Kubernetes-powered workflow, but discovering this can be impossible if an org is already locked into an ops-focused Kubernetes deployment.

Also, Kubernetes is entirely optional so don’t force it before the operations team is ready. Avoid ClickOps, even if that means delaying orchestration.

At the risk of giving people SATs flashbacks, the admission that OpenShift is not, was not, was never supposed to be, and will never be kubernetes has happened. It feels good to have that clarity, even if the marketing and sales folks haven’t changed their tunes yet.

A brief lengthy rant follows on what adoption of the “Scaled Agile Framework” (SAFe) indicates in 2020. For a more comprehensive blow-by-blow of how SAFe is deficient, head over to google. This focuses on the indicators related to the selection of SAFe and not the framework itself.

Work on the remote handbook template continues, though it’s in a state now where an interested party can go to https://handbook.brownfield.dev and use the link on the home page to download a GitLab import to start their very own project.

The relational database approach where all data is normalized and business logic runs in stored procedures creates maintainability problems that create unlimited risk and cost over time. Every year of continued database operation puts the product and organization further behind.

This is a brief update to share that I switched out the shell version for a golang version. This change made the tweeting mechanism smarter while reducing the container size to 1/5th of what it was.

This is not related to brownfield technology, but it is something that can be done to help with handbook updates and other non-code sorts of projects. This recipe has some interesting ingredients such as GitLab CI, a Twitter API warpper for Go, Twitter Apps, GitLab Pages workflow, A Docker Container, and the route-map file.

Maybe you’ve noticed recently, or a long time ago, that getting stuff done just isn’t so easy anymore. Redoubling efforts doesn’t seem to make up the gap. Intentions and expectations are lowered and still quality or schedules are suffering. It’s not an easy cycle to break, but there are lots of approaches to try!

No Factor Apps is what we can call classic applications that people have been building since the dawn of time. This is a reference to the “factors” used by the folks at 12factor.net which is a fantastic resource for what approaches to use and how they contribute to improved delivery quality and speed.