Skip to main content

The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim and Kevin Behr

This was briefly available for free on December 19th, so I picked it up to read over the holiday, enjoying a good novel.

 I like the pixel art!

It's how a fictional company goes from guesswork to greatwork regarding the many, many facets of its tech departments.

"Processes are there to protect people."

I realized quite a few interesting things: 

High, lofty titles like VP of Technology may be for some people, but not for me. Give me good old, on the ground IT Help Desk or Network Technician any day. This had me rethinking my entire career path - applying for 3 years to possibly get into a company like this?

But every career has its challenges and tough times. Nothing is immune, and if it is, it's not fun!


However, if you'd like to share this blog with others so we get some views and maybe a sponsor, well, I won't be opposed to that.  #AvoidCorporateRigamarole2020




Tech departments are a lot more varied than I thought. There is a segment where a critical server is down, and multiple departments are blaming each other, from Database, to Developers, to Networking. I understand why recruiters may be annoyed at a submission to a role that seems similar to us, but not to them.

There is a reference to the second greatest movie of all time.

The bureaucracy and politics of big business for resources is for other people, not me. There's even a line that says many of the factory workers live paycheck to paycheck. There's not enough money to even help the business run at first.

These are the environments we try so hard to be a part of so we don't starve.

Small startups have their problems (Hi, Away, WeWork, and probably others), but at least it doesn't take 3 weeks to make a change. This does encourage me to ask employers about their change processes for further up the ladder -

Do we need to log our requests / changes in any particular system? Is there one set up?

Your boss isn't listening to you. I hope that's the exception and not the norm.

Of course, this is pre-fixup, before our main character jumps in to reorganize the tech department.It's interesting, and everything is okay! Sure there are challenges, but it's not putting out fires all the time. It's facing new things and learning and making the company better. And that's all we want!

Also; Wes is my favorite. 

A good portion of the book - about 20% - is dedicated to explaining DevOps things in depth, without a narrative blanket. Much of it makes no sense to me yet, but it's a good place to read and start learning from.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Making KPI Dashboards with PowerBI

 While this is the free tier, I cannot share or collaborate with others, nor can I publish content to other people's workspaces, but they will not stop me from screenshooting and recording these self-taught adventures,so! I'm doing this because I idly searched "Mattel careers" and "Information Technology", and seeing a bulletpoint saying the following: Analytical and reporting skills such as creating dashboards and establishing KPIs such as experience with PowerBI, Cognos, Tableau, and Google Data Lake/AWS is preferred And thought "Well, I've used Tableau, and I've heard about PowerBI,  even if its in-demandness is questionable , so how similar is it? And can I write about it?"  First, PowerBI (PIB) does have a downloadable, local version, but apparently Windows-only. I could download the .exe but I couldn't run it / drag it to applications on my MacBook.  Not a problem, we'll use the online SaaS version, and a dataset found here, ...

Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

 If you're seeing this post, I'm helping you, and you probably have LI presence: React and share this post to help me in return.   In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an...

Create a Simple Network (Packet Tracer) + A Walkthrough

Again; I've done this, but now there's so many new things, I'm doing it again. The truly new portions were...everything on the right side of this diagram; The cloud needed a coax connector and a copper Ethernet connector. It's all easy to install, turn off the cloud (Weird), install the modules. Getting the Cable section of Connections was an unusual struggle - The other drop down menu had nothing within. It required going into the Ethernet options and setting the Provider Network to 'cable', which is the next step AFTER the drop-downs. The rest was typical DHCP and DNS setups, mainly on the Cisco server down there. The post is rather short - How about adding a video to it? Find out what A Record means - This site says 'Maps a name to an IP address', which is DNS. So it's another name for DNS? You can change them (presumably in a local context) to associate an IP address to another name.