Devops, the software development methodology in which engineers are not only responsible for architecting and building software, but also infrastructure and operational tasks like fleet management, logging, and monitoring, can teach parents a lot about how to educate their children and be better partners in their development. In this process, developers take on additional roles and responsibilities from typical IT responsibilities in an effort to improve the end to end quality and speed of delivery of features for users.

The temperature is rising, trees are just starting to bloom, and a fog constantly rises from the mountains of Northern New Jersey, all indicating that spring, and with it, College Recruiting season are nigh upon us. Since February, I’ve been at college fairs across the New York region as well as Texas and seen some of the best and brightest students come out and knock the career fair process out of the park, while others have admittedly stumbled a bit more.

Reminder, this blog represents my own opinions only and is on no way affiliated with my employer, Audible or Amazon. Still I think these thoughts are pretty common. In 2014, I moved from a software development role on my team to managing it. During the time since, I slowly began to write less code, made a concerted effort to contribute on some projects, pick up bug fixes on critical projects, help with low severity issues, and do some side projects.

I’ve been reading The Art and Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance and one of the topics of exploration that comes up is quality and what it really means. The assertion is that quality can be seen and observed, but is nearly impossible to describe or articulate. With this in mind, I started thinking about what quality means with code. Now, there are a few ways of analyzing code, but when it comes to articulating what really makes code high quality, I am similarly stumped.