Coming to grips with DevOps metrics

In my team we have been considering ways to monitor our own performance, and finding some ways to contextualise our ongoing process and quality improvements. Like many other teams, we’ve landed on the DORA metrics as a good way of doing this.  These four key metrics are an easy way to understand what adjectives like “maintainable”, “reliable”, and “efficient” mean in practice when applied to software and teams, and the provide a way of comparing team performance across teams and over time.

Gephi is a piece of software for visualising graph networks. It’s a powerful tool, and to use it fully requires significant domain knowledge that I don’t possess, but fortunately it’s still fascinating to play around with as an amateur!

As a techie, to me the obvious networks to graph are those created by the big Social Networks - YouTube, Facebook, etc. It’s not hugely surprising to find that mostly these graphs mostly aren’t available for querying, but excitingly there is a plugin that allows you to stream in live data from Twitter.

DISCLAIMER: This was not my idea - I picked it up from Jane Nicholson at an XTC event, who was introduced to it by Jess Gilbert (who in turn, I am told, got it from someone else). This post is just explaining why I believe it can be a useful exercise, not any truly original thinking!

One of the things that is really important to me is that my team and I keep learning at work. As such, fostering a learning environment is kinda key. I think we do that pretty well at Haplo – we have hired nearly exclusively early-career developers to our tech team for several years now, and one of the key points most hires mention as to why they join is that they feel it’s a good place to learn quickly, with the requisite support early on in their career.

I like being able to code wherever I am. “Unfortunately”, my 15" laptop bought to run simulations for my degree still runs like a dream, so I can’t really justify buying myself a replacement for it. So instead, just over a year ago, I decided to get something that is:

• Lightweight
• Cheap
• Allows me to code on the go

Looking around a bit, a budget Chromebook seemed like a good choice. I settled on an Asus Chromebook C201, which cost me £190. It has 4GB of RAM, a 16GB SSD, and weighs under a kilo.