#005 - It‘s getting serious, and I’m enjoying it

Long time no see. What happened in the last weeks, and why did it take me so long to write an update? Clients got in between and summer parties. Life happens. But no worries, also a lot of things at DevOps Metrics moved forward. Conference talks, UI updates, and proof of concepts with customers.

What happened

GitHub integration finished

Having a freelancer supporting on implementing the backend was the right decision. The Github integration is finished. The only thing missing is a nice-to-have feature to import team structures from GitHub.

I can already progress on the analytics part and build out the API layer.

The next integration is JIRA. Many companies I talked with use JIRA for a substantial part of their processes. It will be very likely that DevOps Metrics has to retrieve some information from the data in their JIRA installations.

But, no big surprise: I saw this coming. Although, the landing page of DevOps Metrics is outdated after this change. It will be updated soon-ish.

Proof of concepts with customers

A few weeks ago, I shared with you that I do customer research interviews. These efforts turned out to be an excellent idea. Hence, I talk with a couple of companies about PoC’ing DevOps Metrics for their needs.

So, if you are interested in getting into this exclusive round of early adopters, ping me. :-)

Furthermore, I got so much out of the talks with potential customers, e.g.:

• filtering by teams and/or repositories is important
• depending on the process, there are no stable teams on a repository
• focussing on one metric at a time is a good approach for improving your DevOps Metrics
• regardless of how good the software product will be, I need to account for some consulting on top

The SaaS DevOps Metrics will be successful when I make my customers successful.

I appreciate this relationship a lot because it is so much my purpose: Build a better future for engineering teams and their managers

Conference, here I come!

Do you still remember when I submitted the talk “DevOps: the secrets to sustainable innovation” first time?

It got accepted! I can make people aware of the science behind DevOps and the Accelerate book at the OOP Conference 2022.

The second submission to another conference was not accepted. But hey, next conferences and meetups to come!

UI: Overview and Cycle Time page done

I mean, a software product is never done. But you should get what I mean.

The analytics overview page shows different charts for each of the four key metrics of DevOps, giving you trends based on your selection and sums it up in four KPIs on top.

When you want to analyze why the cycle time increased, you can navigate to the cycle time analytics page.

This shows you the different phases from development until a change is in production. You can identify where your teams can improve next. What you don’t see: these charts are interactive. You can disable the phases you don’t want to see. By this, you can tailor the analysis to your needs.

Furthermore, you see a distribution of all your selected pull requests: how many took a day and how many took weeks.

And if this is not enough, you can get a fast overview by repositories as well.

What did I learn

Improve your support network

If you leave your comfort zone, and you should, it is good to have a support network. In my case, this is my boyfriend and some good friends. But, you bore people if you discuss the same topics over and over with them. And when starting a business, you probably don’t have many other things to talk about. :-)

That’s why I was delighted when a fellow indie hacker approached me, and we spontaneously created a Mastermind group of three indie hackers/bootstrappers. We meet bi-weekly and discuss 2 hours what happened, what we struggle with, where we like to have feedback and what we focus on for the next two weeks.

Consistency is key

I have good days, and I have bad days - like every one of us. Admitting this is the first step, and then doing a bit every day or every few days. Little progress stacks up over time.

Colors are hard

Finding a color palette for things like stacked bar charts is magnitudes more difficult than I expected. Because I like to take care of people with color blindness. The tool I used was recommended by my Twitter community: coolors

It has plugins to double-check your palette against all sorts of color blindness types. Very handy!

Coffee Kitchen Talk

In the coffee kitchen, we chat about interesting and funny stuff like you would be a co-worker.

Game development was one of my main motivations to learn to program when I was 13 years old. It never really happened, though. I found more joy in simulations, analytics, and distributed systems.

But recently, I discovered a youtube channel about game engine development. These low-level machine problems, algorithms, maths, and planning of a bigger coding project - really excites me. The creator shows the development of a game engine from scratch!

Inspirational tweet

It’s about the journey, not the destination. Progress is not linear. We need to adapt on the way.

Where vs. how pic.twitter.com/BQcc0sovVM

— Visualize Value (@visualizevalue) August 15, 2021

Next weeks

I plan to finish the deployment analytics page at the moment. The first sketches for the other two metrics are also in the making. Once the deployment page is done, I want to update my landing page to reflect all my learnings properly and show more about the actual SaaS offering. This should further improve the waiting list’s conversion rates or filter out the customers I don’t want to have.

I want to reach out to two more people on the waiting list on the customer research side.

See you in two weeks. This time I try to make it in two weeks. :-)

– Felix