Written February 15, 2015

The Long Con - A Developer's Continuous* Story (NDC Abstract)

While industry leaders espouse the benefits of Continuous*, agility and a DevOps culture, many an enterprise developer stands in a fallow field searching for greener pastures. The popular perception that transformation must originate as a corporate decree or be sold through consulting hours is flatly wrong. Cultural changes can be home grown, evolving from the initiative of a passionate individual with just a little planning and ingenuity.

The first leg of our journey begins simply enough with analyzing the business climate, gathering some off the shelf tooling and building an understanding that life can be better than the Publish Web Site Tool. After creating modest but localized momentum, our focus is shifted to finding allies within our organization who can disseminate tooling, best practices and most importantly our excitement. The final leg will focus on the cross functional techniques required to onboard our business, investigating the promises of Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment.

Leading massive organizational change is not outside the bounds of a developer’s role. The hallowed halls of unicorn stories are attainable through iterative and incremental change, but not without our personal sacrifice and a willingness to play the long con.