GoKawiilJames Governor: So giving it a name is really important. That's part of why we wrote Progressive Delivery. There was a movie in the very olden days, and I don't think it's particularly well remembered or anything. It was called Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead.
It was about-- There was sort of mafia, and there were some contextual things. "Give it a name" was one of the themes that ran throughout the show. One of the things was boat drinks. So they would talk about boat drinks, and boat drinks was like, you know, you're the mafia, it's the end of your career, and you end up, you know-- Valhalla for the mafia is you in Florida on a boat drinking ridiculous cocktails. And those are the boat drinks, sort of Valhalla.
Heidi Waterhouse: Uh-huh.
James: One of the themes of this movie was: Giving it a name. A movie about language. And I, who work in the tech industry as an industry analyst, obviously protection rackets, giving it a name, I understand that. It's not generally something that we do, but there may be some firms that do like to give things names.
Anyway, the truth is, in tech we coalesce around concepts. It is great to be able to say, "Oh, that. Yeah, I get it. Progressive Delivery. You pull together feature flags and dark launches and the observability to close the loop and all of these other things. This is great. I get it. This is production excellence. Amazing. Progressive Delivery."
But the podcast, I think there's something--
Kim Harrison: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. James, let's pause. You gave Progressive Delivery a name. For those who may not have heard any other episode, why did you name it Progressive Delivery? Just in one minute or less.
James: Basically Sam Guckenheimer from Microsoft Talks about progressive rollouts, something that they did--
Adam Zimman: Progressive experimentation, right?
James: Progressive experimentation, sorry. It was something that Microsoft have done actually for the longest time. If you think about the blast radius, one of the reasons everybody gets pissed off at Microsoft when they do shit and you know, that may be updating the operating system or anything else, is the blast radius is so big. Right? You are touching so many people, so everybody knows about it.
... continue reading