Release Engineering: It Ain't What it Was

During the course of my twenty-four years as a Release Engineer, although tools have improved, machines have gotten faster and we have become more interconnected, for the first three quarters of that time most of what I had been doing had not changed that much. I was still gathering up tasks that slowed down developers in their work, taking responsibility for automating, running and monitoring those tasks, and taking further responsibility to chaperon the product out the door to the customer.

More recently, however, I have been noting some evolutionary changes that seem like game changers to me. Especially as a contributor in the Engineering Tools team at Netflix over the past four years (we provide build and release best practices and tooling for the entire company) I have not only had the chance to participate in some changing trends as they happen but am in an environment where the changes get discussed extensively in collaboration. It has given me pause to consider which changes are window dressing or simple technical improvements, versus fundamental shifts. The changing landscape of software development is touching every company today, presenting professional Release Engineers interesting and challenging opportunities within their specific contexts.

In my presentation I will draw on my recollections of “the early days” to point out how a few fundamentals used to be but aren’t so much any more. And, more importantly, how failing to make note of these changes can result in obsolete thinking habits which are now counter-productive. Technical changes are more obvious, but thinking habits more pervasive. As the development environment changes, our approaches to solving Release Engineering problems must be refined. The objectives don’t change all that much, but our strategies must. I will call out a few modern trends in the development environment that impress me for their impact on Release Engineers. Although it is likely that you will have to adopt and modify anything I have to share, it is my goal to share a few observations about how these changes impact your day-to-day job and should impact your preparations for the future.

Curt Patrick has been a Release Engineer almost his entire career in Software Development even though he didn’t know that was what it was going to be called when he started doing it twenty-four years ago. For him, now is the most exciting time to be in this field of work, not just because the problems are more challenging, and the tools are more sophisticated, but also because the Netflix Engineering Tools team where he currently works is such an invigorating environment in which to collaborate on solutions.