Nathen Harvey

DORA started over a decade ago, and the way I first got involved was when Puppet, who started this research program, sent out a survey at the time. I was responsible for managing a bunch of web applications, so I participated in the survey. I was one of the first participants in that survey, but then over the years I've of course changed roles. I was working at Chef Software for a long time. While I was at Chef, I worked together with Dr. Nicole Forsgren who was part of the DORA team, Jez Humble also part of the DORA team. Nicole and Jez left Chef and founded DORA, then about a month after I had joined Google Cloud, DORA was acquired by Google Cloud and we were all brought together again. It’s been super fun. Now I lead DORA within Google Cloud! 

My team of Advocates here at Google Cloud works with customers all the time, helping them take DORA research and put it into context for their teams, then using that research and context to actually drive improvements. One of the things that we encountered was that from one customer to the next, a lot of the questions were very similar. So this really told us we had to create a way to bring all of these folks together, and in 2022 we launched the DORA community.

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You can go to dora.community to join. The community itself is made up of practitioners of leaders and researchers all in this space, all trying to figure out how we improve developer productivity, how we can make better connections between what we're doing with technology and the business and customer outcomes, and how do we ensure that we're doing so in a way that improves the well-being of everyone on the team in our organization.

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We have a mailing list where we have deep discussions around the nuances of some of the four key metrics of DORA and how people are putting some of these ideas into practice. We also host regular virtual meetings where we'll get together, often with a subject matter expert who will kick off a conversation. Most of our conversations are run using the “lean coffee” format, so every participant gets an opportunity to propose topics and we talk about the things that are top of mind for the people that are there right now. It's a great way to connect and stay engaged with this community.

For me it was definitely something that kind of evolved. I had no idea that this was what I wanted to do when I grew up—I'm still not sure what I want to do when I grow up—but developer advocacy is a good place for me right now. I was working in an organization managing a bunch of infrastructure and we were automating all of that infrastructure using Chef, so I ended up finding the Chef community and I just fell in love with it. I had this great opportunity to join Chef and lead the community, and that's really where I feel like I really evolved into a Developer Advocate. After six years at Chef I decided I was ready for a change and I landed here at Google Cloud where I've been advocating for SRE practices since I joined.

This is a really interesting question. I think at the end of the day all of these disciplines are really about how we can use technology to deliver customer value, to best drive our businesses forward. Yes. There are different techniques. There are even different names that we use. Unfortunately just sort of the nature of the business the nature of the Beast is that over time the definition or the meaning of a particular word tends to get watered down and changed and mutated and devops as a movement as a community as a philosophy has always been one that has shunned an official definition. That vacuum kind of means that everyone gets to decide what DevOps means to them. I worry honestly that DevOps, although it was born from a place of inclusivity, has become a little bit too exclusive. 

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I think that when you kind of get down to the first principles and the fundamentals of DevOps, or SRE or Platform Engineering, it's all about how we can improve the lives of the people that we're working with and provide better value through the use of technology. It would be wrong to say that those labels don't matter though because they absolutely do—it helps us identify our community and describe our work. But it will always evolve over time—after “Platform Engineer” there will be a new term. Either way, we’re all working together to deliver the same value. And when people use phrasing like “DevOps is dead”, it can hurtful to people who are doing honest and helpful work.

I have three children, they're mostly grown, so I love spending time with them and visiting. I love traveling. And I love bourbon and beer. My wife and her sister also own a little clothing boutique here in Annapolis so I also get to be their summer intern and help out at the store.