Counterintuitively, Adding Capacity doesn’t Help
When the rational and logical path has unintended consequences, and what to do about it.
Posts by Year
Pre-2013 blog archive @davemangot tweet archive
2025
2024
Cross-functional Teams are NOT for PE Portcos
The appeal of cross-functional teams is seductive. Always shipping, no more waiting. Knowledge spreads. Now we just need to find someone to pay for it… Good luck.
Respect for Production
Respect for production is not about intention or diligence. It’s knowing exactly what is servicing our customers.
Who’s in charge of your infrastructure? You or the computer?
Don’t ask the computer to change for you. To move quickly and safely, declare your intentions.
Hey, Let’s Embed an SRE in that Dev Team!
Get most of the benefit of a fully staffed team for a fraction of the cost? Looks great on paper.
Maintenance like an airplane, not a car
If maintenance is not part of the lifecycle, it’s repeated project work, and deadly for velocity.
GenAI Copilots Exacerbate Problems
Copilots can locally optimize the system, making everything worse in the process.
The Problem with Maintenance Windows and Change Freezes
It seemed like a good idea in 2001, it wasn’t. It’s an anti-pattern for stability.
Do More With the Same, not Less
We can usually handle more work, with the people we already have.
GenAI to Code Faster is Data Center Thinking
Automation is not about doing things faster, it’s about shortening feedback loops.
2023
Own the problem, not the solution
The solution is the easy part, understanding your problem is hard.
Centers of Excellence vs. Communities of Practice in Transformation
Communities of Practice change an organization, not a silo
Deploying an internal engineering conference
On the path to take companies to the next level, deploy internal conferences to do the same for engineering
A project orientation robs your engineers of Pride of Workmanship
Good leaders enable engineers to feel pride in their work to deliver differentiating results
Show me the tests
Feelings are an important part of engineering. But they don’t replace automated tests.
What your data team should be hiding from you - the database
Most developers shouldn’t know or care about the database technologies.
Deployments not Releases
Turn releases into something for Marketing, not Engineering
We’ll speed up by splitting off a team to handle tickets, now we’re slower
Trying to close more tickets “doesn’t scale”
It’s the system, st*pid
If management wants different outcomes, only they can change the system.
Technical Debt is not a Technical Problem
Known or unknown, the thing about technical debt that leadership needs to understand.
2022
Agile Abuse
Agile is not to control, measure, or micromanage teams.
(missed) Shift Left
Shifting left is not merely shifting work earlier.
An incomplete list of costs for maintaining marginal products that are not easily measurable in dollars.
Cost of delay, opportunity costs, etc. are not easily calculated
The Secret to Cloud
The cloud isn’t someone elses datacenter but with APIs
The thousand paper cuts team
Having one group do all the tickets seems like a good solution…
Would you rather have a snow day or detention?
As an engineering leader, avoid ad hoc meetings
The Hosting site Rule of 3
When deploying infrastructure, simply costing less can be much, much more
2021
Cloud Engineering requires code
If you’re trying to understand why your SaaS is slow, look for the SRE coders.
That’s MTBF Thinking
Entropy is real. MTBF thinking tries to suppress what is real. DIE instead.
Automation is the answer, right?
Automation doesn’t replace humans, it enhances them, if we think about it in the right way.
What is the role of the enterprise architect?
The days of the ivory tower enterprise architect are over. Instead, embrace cultural (architectural) evolution.
Check lists, not check off lists
Checklists are not just something to be accomplished. Used properly, they allow us to learn more about our systems.
Yes Felicia, even with Serverless, someone has to do the DevOps
Even with Serverless, one has to obey the cloud provider failure boundaries
Two things that will never work here
When looking to create a more agile business, we can take inspiration from many sources. But ultimately, the problems we need to solve are our own.
Help a good Ops team be world class
If you want your company to be successful, give it something your competitors don’t have. A world class service delivery organization.
What’s the Right Metric for Innovation?
With the right culture, companies whose teams hit “singles” consistently will outperform competitors who are overly reliant on the “home run.”
Get Good at Delivering Software
Survival in the digital age requires an emphasis on execution and speed, enabled by a DevOps approach across the business
The Service Delivery Assessment
There are many options for DevOps assessment, the best one also helps your organization get good at delivering software.
3 Things to know when moving to public cloud
When working with companies on cloud migration, rather than focus on tools or technologies, we focus on fundamentals.
Process is a sign of success
Keeping up with growth in an organization is a GOOD problem. Process is a great solution, if done the right way.
Tech Debt and Company Growth
There are engineering concepts that are very difficult to quantify. Even if we could, does it make sense to aim for zero?
Growth culture in Westrum typology terms
Many teams in the alternative capital markets space talk about the elements of their culture that enable growth. This “conscious inquiry” approach is well known to high performing teams in the DevO...
2020
Happy Holiday Hack Week
Engineers work hard all year. One of the best ways to be a high performer is to remember, downtime.
On Virtual Conference Speaking
Attending virtual conferences is a new experience. Presenting a virtual conferences requires a very different approach.
Managing work from the front
Being a frontline manager requires a careful negotiation between the business and the engineers. If we focus our efforts on needs, we’ll always be doing the right things.
Make it a spreadsheet problem
Making data-driven business decisions can change the entire equation.
How to bring order to Chaos
When taking charge of an organization characterized by chaos, use these principles to help quickly turn the ship get things under control.
Organizing around the Value Stream
When working on multiple projects at once, it is hard to make good progress. If we organize around the value stream, then we can help the work to flow through our system.
Engineering the hiring of engineers
Engineering is much more than just writing code – it’s about improving a system. By re-engineering our hiring processes, we can bring much-needed efficiency and results to the system.
Distributed, Not Remote
Every company may be a software company, but many software companies are now becoming distributed software companies. By adopting an everyone remote culture, we can hire, empower, and enable employ...
Plan the work, Execute the work
In our jobs, it’s not enough to be busy, we need to be productive. By being deliberate about choosing what to work on, we can make real strides for our product, our businesses and ourselves.
2019
Deploy on Fridays, or Don’t
Whether and when to deploy on Fridays should be a choice. A conscious one.
Make the right way, the easy way
If we want teams that are empowered to move quickly and safely, instead of giving them strict instructions on how to perform their jobs, we can make the right way the easy way, and allow the busine...
Moving Operations to Simple with Cynefin
Part of the responsibility of high-performing Operations teams is to keep the developers moving as fast as possible. Using the Cynefin framework, we have a way of characterizing our initiatives and...
Reflections on Health 2.0 2019
Summary of the overlaps I’ve observed between the DevOps movement and the next generation of Healthtech.
Stability vs. Speed, Pick Two
When delivering software to our customers, in any capacity, we’re often faced with a false choice between focusing on stability or speed. With a high performing Operations organization, we can have...
An Agile SRE Meeting Plan
Scrum is not a good fit for SRE teams. Here’s how to be an Agile SRE team.
2018
Showing a Gigabit OpenBSD firewall some Monitoring Love
Gigabit Internet on an OpenBSD firewall with Grafana graphs? Here’s how.
2015
DevOps Across the Enterprise: Moving Past Dev and Ops
DevOps involveds the entire organization. Not just Dev and Ops
2014
On Cross-Functional Teams, DevOps and Spider Charts, pt. 2
Cross functional teams doesn’t mean everyone eventually does everything. People still have their strengths.
On Cross-Functional Teams, DevOps and Spider Charts
Cross functional teams are a great enabler in DevOps. Why?
2013
I’m not a DevOps…Are you an Agile?
Are we losing control of the word DevOps? Is a DevOps engineer a culture engineer?