A talk about lessons learned from building developer and sysadmin-facing tools at Puppet and Docker. It’s applicable to open source tools for broader use and the tools you and your teams develop inside your organization. Building tools, both external and internal, is hard. Getting people to adopt those tools is even harder. These are ideas to make it easier.

1. Developing Good Operations
Tools
“If you build it, they will come.”
James Turnbull
@kartar
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2. Who
• VP of Engineering at Kickstarter
• Advisor at Docker
• Open source chap
• Funny accent
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3. The Art of Monitoring
www.artofmonitoring.com
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4. Who are you folks?
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5. What's this NOT
about?
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6. What's this all about?
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7. So why did Docker get the hype?
• Docker solved real problems (relatively) elegantly.
• Docker wasn't (primarily) built for its developers.
• Adoption trumped features.
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8. Everyone's a hater...
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9. Empathy
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10. Ask your customers
what hurts
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11. It's a product, Jim,
but not as we know it
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12. Good product I
• Requirements.
• Capabilities.
• Limitations.
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13. Good product II
• Design.
• Positioning.
• UX/UI.
• Visual character.
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14. Write up a product
specification
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15. Research works
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16. Try everything
yourself
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17. Assumption is the
mother of all fuck ups
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18. Build small and
iterate
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19. Everything and not
the kitchen sink
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20. Usability matters
• Docs, docs, docs...
• API exposition.
• SDK, integration.
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21. Marketing matters
• A good looking site.
• Real life examples.
• Video tutorials.
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22. Lifecycle
• Care about feedback.
• Care about maintenance.
• Invest in customer services.
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23. You are not the
customer
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24. Questions?
@kartar
http://www.artofmonitoring.com
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