For this week’s Digital Influencer column I interviewed Jez Humble, who burst onto the DevOps scene in 2010 with his award-winning book, Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation, coauthored with David Farley.
This book proved instrumental for putting DevOps on the map for enterprises, and simultaneously catapulted Humble into the tech cred stratosphere. What led him to write such an influential book, and what is he up to next?
The Horror of the ‘Big Hairy Enterprise’
After completing a degree in Physics and Philosophy at Oxford University in 2000, Humble dove right into a dot-com startup – just as the dot-com crash was getting underway.
This experience gave him his first taste of what continuous delivery of software might be like. “I deployed from my computer straight into production,” Humble says of his time at the startup – a practice considered too dangerous for most organizations at the time.
By 2004 he had joined ThoughtWorks, a software development consultancy known for its thought leadership among the software cognoscenti. It exposed Humble to its enterprise customers – an eye-opening experience for him.
At ThoughtWorks he worked on several agile projects in the role of programmer and team lead, taught agile software development for the company’s internal training program, and consulted for large companies on implementing agile processes and continuous delivery.
However, he quickly became disillusioned. “I was horrified how hard it was to build production-like environments,” Humble recalls. “We couldn’t get it to work. That’s normal for the enterprise. It’s just how they did things.”
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/03/31/digital-influencer-jez-humble-devops-for-big-hairy-enterprises/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Chef Software is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Rani Sanghera.
