It’s no coincidence that the ‘center of gravity’ for my Digital Influencer article series is the recently published The DevOps Handbook, as DevOps is a core enabler of digital transformation. Even more than the book itself, however, are the four gentlemen who wrote it – each of them digital influencers in their own right.
First up was Gene Kim, a software entrepreneur whose lifelong fascination with high performing organizations helped him formulate early thinking about what would become DevOps.
Next came Jez Humble, whose horror at how ‘big hairy enterprises’ struggled to build production environments led him to becoming an early DevOps thought leader as well.
Today, our Digital Influencer is John Willis. (The fourth author of the Handbook, Patrick Debois, will be the subject of a future article).
Mainframe ‘Hired Gun’
Willis is a popular blogger and a regular on the DevOps speaking circuit today, but he got his start writing IBM mainframe assembler – a low-level language that has little in common with today’s programming languages.
He grew up in New York City, but the timing was bad for building a career there. “New York was broke, so I moved to Texas during the oil boom with programming skills,” Willis recalls. “I was hired at Exxon within a week.”
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/10/26/digital-influencer-john-willis-from-mainframes-to-devops/.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, 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: DevOps.com.
