Some things I'm thankful for (particularly at work)

Some weeks ago at Trinity Menlo Park, Pastor Aaron reminded us that life is short, and we don’t have many days to bless those around us. Inspired by that remark, I emailed the below to a few (i.e., quite a few) of my co-workers.

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2019-12-04 2:12pm Pacific

Colleagues,

I was reflecting the other day on things I’m grateful for. Family and friends, of course; a measure of health; vehicles and home appliances that work well enough. Not least is the opportunity to work together with so many intelligent, hard-working folks (yes I mean you).

And as I reflect on the ONTAP development experience at NetApp, it strikes me how much better that experience is today as compared to what it has been. Reviewboard is just one of the major improvements that came in over the past 15 years or so.

In the “old days,” you could check something into ontap/main, only to get a nasty-gram from the build daemon. Then you’d find out that the build daemon had been failing for several hours because somebody broke it and no one fixed it!

Auto-heal isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty close, which we can tell by how surprised everybody is when it can’t back out a bad checkin.

I also remember a day when Isabelle submitted something and the build-ng daemon whined at her. She backed her change out and the daemon kept failing! It took several days to figure out that missing dependencies had hidden the real culprit, which had been submitted some weeks before :-(

Bedrock and DOT/dev aren’t perfect either, but again we’re surprised at sporadic failures...

I think of Anchorsteam, which shipped at least a full year late. We added Scrimshaw after Fullsail, because customers were waiting so long for another release—but Scrimshaw was late, too! Back then, managers really had no idea how close we were to being ready. Or they wouldn’t say :-(

Although the six-month release cadence hasn’t been a panacea, it has brought some reality into the management ranks.

And do you remember how much stuff we shipped without testing? Scrimshaw.3 had no snapmirror testing whatsoever! A former VP demanded that we test patches more thoroughly—and also ship them more rapidly—that didn’t work too well.

I am so thankful that today we have CITs and auto-heal, daily code coverage reports, CTL, and other tools to enhance ONTAP’s quality.

All these things took a lot of work from a lot of folks. Reviewboard, bedrock, bammbamm, CITs, auto-heal on both build and CIT, and so much more. You know who you are.

Thank you thank you thank you for how you’ve improved life for developers, and thereby for all the folks that rely on our products every day.