Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A year ago, in July of 2020, I started my SysAdmin Day post  with the words, Here we are, 12 months later, and a lot has changed, but life (and tech) continue to be extraordinarily not-normal. The challenges we face as IT pros in general and SysAdmins in particular push us to our limits daily, and there’s no hiding or sugar-coating it. In the face of all this, I’d like to offer some new thoughts for my SysAdmin family to help process the year that was and navigate the challenges to come.

As a developer, you’re going to be making changes to a codebase. That’s why, as Harold Abelson put it, “Programs must be written for people to read.” If a codebase is not clearly formatted, debugging becomes more difficult than it should be. Though usually overlooked, little changes like reformatting and proper indentation of your code can obviously differentiate a professional developer’s code base from someone just learning.

This week in the Civo DevOps bootcamp, we covered what is DevOps & why it matters. There are no prerequisites for this bootcamp. The only thing we require is your passion to learn and explore. This session was undertaken by mentors highly experienced in their respective fields. Read on to learn more about it!

In the IT team at Redox, I wear two hats: Software Development Manager and DBA. I’m the only DBA in the team, so if anything goes wrong it’s my job to identify and fix it. As you might imagine, this can be challenging when being a DBA isn’t your full-time role. Based in Sydney, Redox is one of the leading chemical and ingredients distributors in the world, with over 350 employees across our locations in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and the US.

Datadog CI Visibility, now available in beta, provides critical visibility into your organization’s CI/CD workflows. CI Visibility complements Datadog’s turn-key CI provider integrations and the integration of synthetic tests in CI pipelines to give you deep insight into key pipeline metrics and help you identify issues with your builds and testing.

As part of your monitoring and testing strategy, you may run tests on different types of applications that are not publicly available—from local versions of production-level websites to internal applications that directly support your employees. Testing each one requires leveraging tools that allow you to verify functionality across a wide range of devices, browsers, and workflows while maintaining a secure environment.

Engineering teams can only be as efficient as the processes they employ during development. The need for increased efficiency is why software development has shifted from the “waterfall” approach to a more responsive, agile methodology. In an agile development environment, quality software can be delivered consistently to suit the ever-changing needs of stakeholders and end users.