Thomas Henson

Book Review: Boyd the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

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Boyd the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

Why read a fighter pilot book? 

Ever heard of the OODA loop?

It’s the basis for agile development. Observe, Orient , Decide, and Act (OODA) is the feedback loop coined by John Boyd. The point of the loop is to go through these steps repeatedly faster than your foe.

In Agile software development we try to mimic these steps in our iterations of work. First, we find a problem to solve (Observe). Next, we create a user story how to solve the problem (Orient). Then, we add the user story to our development schedule (Decide). Finally, we develop the solution based on the user story (Act). At the end of this loop the feature/enhancement is pushed to production where its usefulness is tested which starts a new feedback loop. The faster we can iterate through these loops the better our applications will be for our users.

Watch the video below to find out more.

 

Transcript How a Fighter Pilot Created DevOps

Hi, Thomas Henson here with thomashenson.com, and today, we’re going to do a book review on Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War.

Stay tuned, right after this.

Hi, welcome back. Today, I’m doing a book review on Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. You’re probably thinking, “Okay, wait a minute. This is a fighter pilot book. How is this going to relate to technology, big data, you know, software development?” Let me just say, it absolutely applies. You use it every day, and you probably learned about it in any of your business courses or any of your corporate meetings that you’ve been in.

I’m sure somebody’s referenced something in there called the OODA loop. I’ll talk a little bit about that here in just a second. I did want to tell you how I got into the book.

I got into the book following Ryan Holiday’s, I think it was books, maybe 25 or 20 different books that are biographies that everyone must read. It’s been on that list, and I’ve been making my way through that list. I’ve also seen it recommended a couple different other places. I’ve been wanting to do it, kind of been putting it off.

I probably should have gotten to it a little bit faster. The book is about John Boyd. He was fighter pilot back in, I think started out in World War II. He didn’t really ever see any combat experience there. The book is really good. It’s really about his career and the way that he solved problems.

The way that he approached solving different problems. One of the first things that he did, and was really known for, is he changed the way that fighter pilots and the way that fighter planes are designed, and how they’re measured as well.

He came up with a formula and different way of being able to measure how velocity, and how banking, and some of the other terms that I don’t really understand around fighter pilots and around planes, but just avionics in general.

He came up with a way to change that, and it changed the way that every fighter plane around the world, not just in America, was designed, and how they’re designed still to this day. He totally changed that part.

Another huge part that he changed was, he changed the way that wars are fought. A little bit about war strategy in there, so if you’ve read The Art of War, and some of the other books, he took a lot of that information for a lot of different campaigns throughout the years, researched some of it, and actually came up with a different way to strategize, and to do war fighting.

When you start looking at that, that actually bleeds over into business. He came up with what you’ve probably heard of as the OODA loop. It’s the observe, orient, decide, and act. The OODA loop is what we use in business strategy, but it’s also what we use in agile development.

Jeff Sutherland, who was a fighter pilot, I think in Vietnam. You can read in his agile book, where he actually voices and references the OODA loop in the way that agile development is done, and the way that we solve problems even in software engineering.

You’re probably seen it, too, in a lot of corporate events, and I think it started becoming part of business curriculum in a lot of colleges around the US, sometime in the early ’80s, too, so all from that strategy, John Boyd was the father of that OODA loop and the strategy there, and doesn’t get a lot of credit for it.

I’m not going to spoil too much of it and tell you why he doesn’t get credit, or how it all evolves, but let me just say, I recommend the book. It’s a really good read. It’s probably something you can do in a week, week and a half, if you’re just reading about 30 to 40 pages a day.

I definitely think that anybody should read it, so there’s also some personality things in there too that you can learn from. It’s not just about learning all the things he did, but you can actually, because it follows his career, and it’s a biography of him, you could follow and learn from some of the mistakes that he made, too.

Really good book. Everybody should probably check it out. At least put it on your list and get to it at some point. Learn more about the OODA loop and some of the other things. Make sure you subscribe. I know this is a book review, but if you have any questions around Big Data Big Questions, you can subscribe here, so that you’re never going to miss an episode of that. If you have any questions, make sure to put it in the comments here or go to my website, thomashenson.com, and look for the Big Data Big Questions, and submit the questions there.

Thanks, and I will see you again next time.

Analyzing Machine Data with Splunk

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My newest Pluralsight course has just released Analyzing Machine Data with Splunk. It might appear as a step outside of the Hadoop ecosystem but read on to find out how it actually ties back.

Analyzing Machine Data with Splunk

The past 6 months I’ve taken a deep dive into the Splunk. I had a lot of questions when I first started….

Is this just like the ELK stack?

How is all this data stored?

What’s the integration with Hadoop look like? (spoiler alert it’s awesome and named HUNK)

All I can say is I was blown away with how amazing Splunk is at data analytics. It’s no wonder why Splunk is #1 for analyzing machine data in IT Organizations around the world, however, it’s not just for machine data. Splunk started out with analyzing log files, but because of it great dashboard tools and ability to parse different data types, it’s quickly jumped outside of IT Operations.

Analyzing Machine Data with Splunk is broken into 7 different modules

  1. What is Splunk? – First thing we do is dive into what Splunk is. What’s Splunk’s history and who is using Splunk. Lastly in this module we talk about careers in Splunk and what the options are for Splunk Admin/Developers.
  2. Setting Up the Splunk Environment – Once we have the level set on Splunk it’s time to setup our own local Splunk environment. Splunk offers a few options for Splunk environments in this module we discuss each of them. At the end of this module we walk through setting up your own Splunk environment in a Windows environment.
  3. Basic Splunking Techniques – During this module we are ready to dig into using our local Splunk environment to analyze log files. Basic Splunk searches, creating reports and alerts are essentially building blocks taught in this module. The last part of this module walks through using the Search Processing Language (SPL) which is Splunk’s search language.
  4. Splunking in the Enterprise – Next we jump into the Enterprise features in Splunk. Encrypting and compressing data in flight is essential when working in the Enterprise and Splunk has you covered here. Also we work through setting up scaleable Splunk environments because data is only going to grow so let’s go ahead and be ready.
  5. Splunking for DevOps and Security – Security and DevOps are hot topics and careers right now. Splunk plays in both these fields. Security is the top use case for Splunk because it gives Enterprises the ability to have a 360 view of their IT environments. The demo in this module walks though using Splunk to analyze log4j files in DevOps.
  6. Application Development in Splunkbase – In this module we’ll dive into the Splunkbase to learn how to extend the Splunk environment. Splunkbase in simple terms is like App store for iPhones. Need to import a new data source and don’t want to write your own Regular Expression? Check out Splunkbase. Want to develop your own customer Splunk Apps using the SDK? Splunkbase has you covered with that. Learn about all the things you can do with Splunkbase in this module.
  7. Splunking on Hadoop with Hunk – Ahhhh! Now we are talking. Hadoop on Splunk = HUNK. When I started playing with Hunk it was like the first time I heard the Jay-Z / Linkin Park Collision Course Album. Only this was bigger I mean talk about two world colliding! Splunk provides great dashboards and tools to help ingest machine data without having to do the ETL. With Hunk you can import or export that data into HDFS.

Pluralsight Course

After all this hard work and Splunk goodness be sure to checkout Analyzing Machine Data with Splunk. This course will help you learn how to leverage Splunk in your everyday IT Operations.  As always let me know any feedback you have or ideas for more courses in Data Analytics.

The Phoenix Project Book Review

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Where do I start with DevOps?

Working in IT Operations is hard like really hard. Most of you who have been doing for years already know this. Technical debt seems to pile up and developer/operations are constantly being asked to more with less. Most companies are now an IT organization which puts more pressure from the business to help generate revenue.

DevOps is the key to helping IT operations transform from a fragile chaos ridden teams into agile disciplined teams. Sounds like another absurd promise from the buzzword of the day. I’d probably think that way, however, my back ground as a Scrum Master tells me it’s true. In the the developer realm we have been using agile frameworks since the Agile Manifesto was written in 2001. Yes we have a Manifesto!

Phoenix Project Book?

Before jumping in head first I recommend reading The Phoenix Project. It’s a fictional account of a company where everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Of course the problems all fall on IT operations. The book walks through how a company can transform from a traditional IT organization that is seen as a cost center into a revenue generating part of the company.

Find out more by watching my review of The Phoenix Project and DevOps.

 

Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to get my latest videos.

Transcript

Thomas Henson here with thomashenson.com. Today, we’re going to do a book review on the Phoenix Project. If you’re interested in DevOps, stay tuned.

Book Review

The Phoenix Project is a fictional account of an IT organization. You’re probably saying, “Hey, that sounds kind of boring. Why would I want to read a fictional account of an IT organization?” But it’s actually a really good read. It goes through a fictional account of Parts Unlimited, which is an aging company that’s in a very competitive environment. The IT organization just can’t seem to get everything together with all the requirements that’s being put on them. They have a CEO that’s on CNBC a lot promising this new application. The application has been in development for quite a long time and they just can’t seem to get it to market. You follow around the VP of IT, as he’s new into the role, been with the company for a while, and you see a lot of the challenges that they have.

My Perspective

From my perspective, it’s a really good book, because I just came in from the application development side and started working with IT operations people. For me, I’ve started seeing some of the challenges that they have. Coming from the Agile environment and doing Scrum, I realized hey, we can get our requirements out; we can test things; we can push new features out very quickly, but a lot of our challenges come from testing with the operations side. I remember sitting in a meeting one time, and the customer was asking about all the things that we were doing. He was really happy about them, but then he switched to questions about, “Hey, how is this going to be maintained from an operational perspective?” I was like, “I’m not really sure why you’re asking me. We’ve got all these cool features. It’s going to be an awesome project. It’s meeting all the requirements that you have. Here’s the requirements that we need to support that. Now, in the out years, I’m not sure how big the project is going to grow, because it’s just going to be awesome.” I really got beat up in that meeting about those questions. It’s like okay, you’re creating this application, but what’s it going to do in the future? How is it going to balloon up? What’s the cost to maintain an application? How complex is it? One of the things I was thinking when we were working through it is, “Yeah, there are some challenges, and it’s a new system that the operations people have to learn, but everybody wants to learn Linux.” The question was, “Well, we’re going to have to hire somebody. We’re going to have to pay for training.” Those are the things I really didn’t think about. This book puts it into perspective.

Book Examples

One of the examples that they use in it is that a lot of times, developers take a pig, and they throw the pig over the wall. They high five each other, because everything is done. But that pig is given to the operations side with little or no instructions. It’s something that they have to maintain for years on end, where application developers, we get to go to the next project. I thought it was a really interesting read. I thought it was really good, especially for somebody that’s done Agile development on the development side but never really thought about it from a DevOps perspective of how is this going to be used in operations?

Would I Recommend It?

I would recommend this book for anybody, whether you’re a developer, work in IT operations, or even just curious about how IT should work in your organization. It’s a really good book. It’s a really quick read, too. I think you can probably do it… I think it did it over in a weekend. It’s a really good book. You should check it out. For more updates, stay tuned to thomashenson.com.