Coming Soon… The Quiet Revolutionaries (Phil Dibowitz, Jez Humble, Kate Matsudaira, and More)

In the coming weeks Chef will be publishing excerpts from an upcoming collection of editorials entitled The Quiet Revolutionaries, featuring some of the brightest minds in DevOps and web-scale IT. We’ve joined with Devops.com to serialize these essays leading up to the publication of the entire collection, right here at getchef.com. We believe this is very special content indeed, taken directly from some of our most admired thought leaders.

Today we kick things off with excerpts from two of the collection’s contributions. The first is from our own Adam Jacob, introducing each of the five authors and setting the context for the “quiet revolution”. The second is from Phil Dibowitz, a truly Awesome Chef and a production engineer with our friends at Facebook.

Please read on for portions of both Adam’s and Phil’s pieces. You can see even more of Phil’s piece right now at Devops.com and please keep coming back for more teasers leading up to the full unveiling of The Quiet Revolutionaries.

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An excerpt from Adam Jacob, “The Quiet Revolutionaries: An Introduction”

“The Internet; Cloud Computing; Smart Phones; Social Media – all highly visible technology advances that are rapidly covering the globe.  Behind the scenes are human beings, and the companies they work for, making an endless series of technology changes each and every day to delight their customers.

When we deliver a new feature; when we make the infrastructure faster; when we make the system more stable: we are literally programming the future of our businesses, and discovering the way knowledge workers will organize and collaborate.

I’m proud to introduce to you the wisdom of five innovators, and provide you a chance to understand what they’re thinking and doing when it comes to making these new, “Coded Businesses” a reality.

In the following pages, you’ll hear from:

• Jez Humble, Principal Consultant at Thought Works, a true shepherd of the Continuous Delivery movement, who will discuss how speed and scale help businesses capitalize on weak market signals

• John Allspaw, Vice President of Technology Operations at Etsy, who is rapidly becoming the foremost advocate for safe and humane internet automation, explaining how business success is based on the speed of learning

• Kate Matsudaira, Founder of popforms, a leading light for an entire generation of managers and leaders, who says that automating code enables businesses of all sizes to prosper

• Phil Dibowitz, Production Engineer at Facebook, one of the freshest voices in at-scale systems automation, who writes that automating code helps businesses adapt to customer demand quickly

• Jason Stowe, CEO Cycle Computing, a visionary who brings together the power of this emerging movement to solve critical scientific problems, argues that code – plus access to unlimited cloud computing power – is essential…”

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An excerpt from Phil Dibowitz, “Automating code helps businesses adapt to customer demand quickly”. Read more at Devops.com.

“How does the need for speed and scale affect businesses today?

Lets start with scale.

As a technology company grows, its infrastructure grows – more machines (or machine images), more networking, more data storage needs, more code, more developers, more users. The only way to scale with growth is with automation. And, as more and more of the world’s interactions happen online (be it commercial transactions, email, social networking, video streaming, etc.), that scale of infrastructure is breaking records all the time. With these new levels of scale come ever-increasing automation requirements.

On the speed side, first-to-market has always been an important part of business – but what that means has evolved.

It’s no longer simply about producing that new cool item before the other guys. Now it also means you must be able to iterate quickly, adjust quickly for changing user tastes, adapt quickly to the ever-increasing pace of new technologies…”

To be continued!