3 years ago

The first team I managed was a team of developers that were thrown together to build a tool set for compiling (building) programs, provisioning resources (on AWS) and then deploying those built artifacts to target environments. Even though we didn’t know it then, developers who wear these hats apparently are now more commonly known as SREs.

I believe that a large part of our success was that we didn’t have baggage of how to build CICD tooling — most of us were new to the process.

While developing the tools was fairly straightforward, it became clear to us quickly that we also had to inject some culture reshaping, in order to gain acceptance and adoption of the tools we built for the delivery teams we were trying to help. In that journey, I have observed lessons in both how we approached building DevOps enablement tools, but also some of the cultural hiccups we experienced, and how we overcame them.