Bob Walker: Painless Operations - Episode 259

Bob started as a .NET Developer back in the early days of .NET 1.1 with the goal of converting ASP pages to ASP.NET web applications. During that time, his career progressed from .NET Developer to Lead Developer, to Architect, to where he is today. As a technical director at Octopus Deploy, he helps solve complex customer problems as Octopus Deploy. As a team, we help answer both technical and non-technical questions. Bob has been a fan of making it easier to deploy software since the early 2010s, when working for a company the only time to deploy to production was 2 a.m. Saturday. That has led him down the path of CI/CD, DevOps, TDD, and automating all things. He was exposed to Redgate tooling and Octopus Deploy while working at Farm Credit Services of America and has been a fan ever since. In his current role, Bob gets to work with a variety of technologies every day.

Topics of Discussion:

[1:41] One of the biggest high points in Bob's career was being one of the champions of automating database deployments, and seeing that spread across all these other teams.

[3:51] Also, he adopted test-driven development and was able to improve the speed of his application from 500 milliseconds per request to 50 milliseconds.

[5:20] Bob talks about test-driven development.

[7:00] The rules of thumb for people to get right to make running their software system more painless.

[8:14] The problem of database management.

[10:10] There are two schools of thought: state-based management and migration approach.

[12:59] Distributed source control and having a build server are two of the main tools to consider.

[15:28] The critical ingredients of monitoring and recovery.

[22:07] The two ways to define a tenant.

[24:11] One of the advantages of multi-tenancy applications is having a shared application and a shared database, where all the data of all the customers is intermingled with one customer's data.

[27:29] Managing complexity in the cloud.

[33:53] I's all about improving a little, every day, and practicing to get better just a little bit more.

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