When principles meet constraints: DevOps and Clean Code for bootstrapped SMEs

Anuvrat Parashar (~bhanuvrat)


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Description:

The Problem:

For the bootstrapped SMEs of the world, who are walking the tightrope above the chasms of oblivion, where every single penny feels like a fortune, incurring technical debt seems a lot less painful.

Cleanliness features very very low on the priority list of struggling businesses. Restaurants and malls going through tough times can't be bothered to clean their washrooms. Struggling engineering teams can't be bothered to prioritise cleaning their code.

The debt eventually comes due and is most evident in missed deadlines, buggy deliverables, costly maintenance downtimes, and ultimately unhappy customers.

We could choose to stay on our high horse, look down on the smelly codebases in the gutters of the software industry, wrinkle our noses and trot away. But where is the fun in that?

Over the past decade, I and my team at essentia.dev, have waded through millions of lines of smelly code, often managed without version control, edited directly on production servers, without tests, monitoring or backups in place and have lived to tell the tale.

If that picture made you even mildly anxious, come to the talk.

This talk will discuss the what, why and how of the absolute bare minimum set of principles that every software business should practise,, if it wants to have any chance of surviving even when the tide changes.

The Solution:

  • Integrated version control is as important as oxygen.
  • Identical and isolated environments for staging, testing and production.
  • The stench of hard-coded configuration.
  • Automation as insurance: tests, provisioning, deployment and monitoring.
  • The costly addiction of managed services.
  • The hidden cost of over virtualization: docker vs good old VPS vs bare metal.
  • The saving grace of an old laptop or a raspberry pi over a VPN as a cheap server.
  • The cost of unpredictability: Reserved instances save you money!.

Prerequisites:

Past or potential future exposure to software engineering teams.

Speaker Info:

I'm Anuvrat. 8 years ago, I started Essentia.dev, a tailored software engineering company focusing on Design, Development, Devops and Data.

Speaker Links:

https://anuvrat.in

Section: Developer tools and automation
Type: Talks
Target Audience: Intermediate
Last Updated: