Brownfield

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.

Organizations with policies established during a time where colocation was the only way to work are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to suddenly remote productivity. The work from home lifestyle of taking a day to send a few emails but mostly be unproductive was begrudgingly accepted as an infrequent quality of life boost. Reversing that trend, during a pandemic, with kids home and elevated stress levels, it’s going to be tough.

After attending the ATARC IRS Container Forum late last year, I was inspired to share some of my perspective. Between the folks who spoke at that forum and my own interactions with federal agencies, it was clear that waterfall was leaking into DevOps.