June 2022 Summaries

In a podcast episode of "Break Things on Purpose," Jason Yee talks with Aaron Clark, Director of Developer Advocacy at the Royal Bank of Canada, about his career transition from developer to advocate and the application of open-source principles, known as innersource, within organizations. Aaron shares insights from his journey at RBC, where he initially started as a Java developer before moving into cloud development and eventually developer advocacy. He emphasizes the importance of sustainable development, building community, and maintaining continuous learning to help developers achieve long-term project success. Aaron also discusses the challenges and benefits of working within a large organization, where diverse technology stacks and development practices coexist, and highlights the role of developer advocacy in promoting cloud adoption and improving developer experiences. The conversation touches on the need for adaptable frameworks, the significance of innersource in fostering collaboration, and strategies for keeping up with evolving technologies in a risk-averse environment, concluding with an invitation to explore job opportunities at RBC.

Gartner's report, "IT Resilience — 7 Tips for Improving Reliability, Tolerability and Disaster Recovery," outlines strategies for enhancing the resilience of IT systems, highlighting that IT resilience is a continuous process of improvement rather than a one-time initiative. Defined as the ability of systems to be reliable, tolerable, and recoverable, IT resilience involves identifying and mitigating risks while adapting to new challenges. The report underscores the importance of resilience not only for maintaining customer satisfaction but also as a competitive advantage, especially as system complexity increases and failures can take various forms. Chaos Engineering is recommended to uncover unknown failure modes, complementing traditional practices like Disaster Recovery. IT resilience is portrayed as a shared responsibility, with Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) playing a key role in fostering cross-team collaboration. The report predicts a rise in SRE-like roles due to their significant impact on resilience, with 30% of enterprises expected to establish such positions by 2025. The text also emphasizes the importance of identifying IT hazards and risks, particularly as reliance on cloud services grows, urging organizations to proactively surface and address potential failure points.