Devops and Release Notes - A Creator's Journey!
During a career spanning 2 decades, I've led many large software development projects and DevOps has always been key to ensuring a reliable, deterministic outcome. Although Patrick Debois has been credited with coining the term "DevOps" in 2009, the practices that are now known as DevOps have been around much longer.
The scope of DevOps, meaning a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) is very broad, but automation has become key in driving greater efficiency and productivity across development and operations teams. This is why continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines have attracted overwhelming investment and adoption across the IT industry.
In recent years, the ability to plug and play an automated Build, Test and Deploy pipeline has become increasingly easy to achieve.
Some of the DevOps tooling that has influenced my career includes;
- Nant- released 2001
- [http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/) - released 2001
- MSBuild - released 2003
- Git - releases 2005
- Puppet - released 2005
- TeamCity - released 2006
- Microsoft TFS - released 2006
- GitHub - released 2008
- Octopus Deploy - released 2010
- Jenkins - released 2011
- Docker - released 2013
- GitLab - released 2014
- Kubernetes - released 2014
- Azure Devops - released 2018
- ReleaseNotesHub - released 2020
Of course, this is just a small percentage of the tooling that is now available in a rather crowded space. In most cases, developers and DevOps engineers will find an off-the-shelf service or API to solve their need.
However, approaching 2019, I still found producing release notes an area of significant friction. For many companies it was still largely a manual and costly process. Furthermore, the value of release notes was often compromised due to poor search, distribution and useability. Frustrated and in desperate need of a solution for a large project I was leading, I decided to close the gap with ReleaseNotesHub.
The past couple years have been challenging and exhausting, but at the same time very rewarding. Entrepreneurship can be extremely isolating, but communities like this provide tremendous inspiration and hope. Thanks Courtland Allen!
I invite everyone on IndieHackers to follow me as I document my journey to reinvent how we publish, search, discover, explore and use release notes. I also invite you to trial ReleaseNotesHub and submit your feedback.
