From Shoes to Shiny Doughnuts

The term "DevOps" gets bandied about a lot these days, I'm guilty of it myself if I'm honest. However, the ideas behind DevOps, building and deploying rational, cost conscious software aren't exactly new. It's simply the idea that your developers should be thinking about things that were traditionally the realm of the Operations team that's "novel."

I wasn't in Ops. I was an SDET, a software tester at one of the "big four" in Seattle. A few years back they showed me, and a bunch of folks like me the door. They were moving towards a "DevOps" model, and away from silo'd Developer, Test, and Operations teams.

The results of that decision are well documented, and I won't go into them here except to say I wasn't sad to leave.

I landed soft, as most in the tech industry do, at Nordstrom. From software, to shoes, it was quite the transition. I was hired as an SDET, with the stated goal of writing the tests, and collateral, to make sure we shipped a bug-free product. Within a matter of months I was bored. Painfully bored.

Our project consisted of a suite of micro-services, fancy data-transform services, acting as a go-between Nordstrom and a third-party vendor. These were not complicated, and it was trivial to cover the majority of the major, minor, and esoteric scenarios. My biggest bottleneck was my developers, specifically how they were "deploying" code. Locally built binaries copied by hand to a suite of VMs running in AWS. Not exactly scalable.

So, I turned my coat, and moved into Ops. Specifically so that I could have more than a test pass a day.

I spent the next year and a half building out the AWS infrastructure, and Operational collateral to deploy the Nordstrom Rewards program. If you shop at Nordstrom, and you get a Nordstrom Note, you have my team, and pipeline, to thank. To this day, nearly two years after I left the team they're using nearly the exact pipeline, and deployment strategy that I built. To say that feels good, is an understatement.

Yet leave I did, and I spent the next year and a half working in a pharmaceutical data company, before jumping ship back to the "big four" and with that, this blog, with the simply goal of showing how my little slice does DevOps.

Ciao.