The Ship Show The Ship Show Crew

2015 was the year that we saw the issue of systemic, professional burnout make its unfortunate entrance onto the stage of high technology and DevOps. In this episode, we interview the world's foremost expert on burnout, Dr. Christina Maslach, a psychology professor and researcher at UC Berkeley about burnout, its causes and effects, and most importantly: what we can do about it. It's been a year since a series of events started the conversation in our industry and it has all but died back down again. But for people, teams, and organizations struggling with burnout, it remains a critical issue for the industry to confront. Join the entire Ship Show Crew and Dr. Maslach for a very special episode of the podcast: Extinguishing Burnout.

The DevOps community has long resisted a push to define the movement via instruments like cookbooks or manifestos, creating an interesting thread of "lack-of-definition" when describing DevOps and DevOps practices. This issue has come to a head in 2015, as some proponents think we're long overdue to provide a stronger framework around what DevOps actually means in practice. For episode 59, we sit down with the creator of the DevOps Checklist, Steve Pereira, to talk through the items on the checklist, whether or not it's a good idea to even have a checklist, and debate the finer points of what could become: The DevOps Checklist Manifesto.

Back in 2013, Pager Duty's Ranjib Dey surmised that it would take ages for traditional operations teams to learn and adopt mainstream development technologies. The opinion sparked quite a lively discussion around what those mainstream development technologies are, what hurdles exist for operations team to adopt them, and whether it all would be as glacial as Dey guessed. For Episode 58, we welcome Ranjib to the show for a panel discussion to revisit the tweet and look to see if anything has improved in the last 2 years. Join the panel as we parse through the puzzle of: We May Have DevOps, But Does Ops Have the Dev?

So many of the companies who build the tools we use daily take special care to cultivate and nurture a community of users. But that doesn't just happen magically. For episode 57, we sit down with community managers from Chef, Perforce, and VictorOps to talk to them about their experiences building community, the difficulties with community engagement, getting the business to see the value, and what community is really made of. Join us as we talk to the folks responsible for Managing the CommunityOps

If DevOps is CAMS--culture, automation, metrics, and sharing--then it makes sense there'd be a conference on monitoring and metrics...and there is: Monitorama! In episode 56, the crew gets together with Jason Dixon, aka obfuscurity, the founder of Monitorama to talk about the fourth incarnation of the conference. We do a deep dive into what all is encompassed when we say "monitoring," why monitoring really isn't about CPU load and memory, other things you can monitor, and why Paul was stupid for not coming to Monitorama earlier; join us, the crew as: We Monitor the Monitorama

Do you test? Do you want to test? For many operations and build/release engineers (and even some developers!), testing can be a bit of a foreign concept. It's hard to pay attention to getting to 100% code coverage on your unit tests for your inrastructure cookbooks and manifests when the infrastructure is on fire! But... maybe that's why it's on fire? For this episode, Mike McGarr walks us through the nuts and bolts of testing, so we can all become better testers, and start integrating testing into our workflows, even if we're not developers. Join us for: I Don't Always Test, But When I Do...