Hila Fish - Maintainable Infrastructure Code, Culture, and Documentation

Robby has a chat with Senior DevOps Engineer, Hila Fish. They start off by discussing the key characteristics of maintainable infrastructure code. Hila shared insights on providing software engineering teams with the necessary space for exploration while maintaining essential guardrails to ensure the stability of production environments. The conversation also touched upon the significance of offering engineers useful metrics and dashboards for measuring load and stress tests. Robby and Hila reminisced about the evolution of roles like sysadmins and DBAs over the decades, highlighting the transformative journey of infrastructure management.

A focal point of the episode was Hila's experience leading a large migration project from Bitbucket Cloud to a self-hosted Gitlab within a tight six-week timeframe. She emphasized the importance of rigorous testing in both development and production environments, effective communication with stakeholders and the team, and other critical aspects of successful project management. The discussion extended to personal and professional development, with Hila underlining the importance of regularly evaluating one's values against those of the employer and the value of self-retrospectives. 

The challenges in hiring for potential versus expertise in an industry that demands a combination of both were explored. The episode also featured insights into DevOpsDays TLV, Hila's involvement in tech events, and valuable tips for overcoming the initial fear of speaking at such events, accompanied by her own unconventional journey to delivering her first talk. It’s going to be an interesting episode, so don’t miss out.

Helpful Links:

• Hila on LinkedIn
• Open-Source - Open Choice
• Technical Documentation - How Can I Write Them Better and Why Should I Care? By Hila Fish
• Terraform
• Helm
• GitLab
• Bitbucket
• DBAs
• DevOpsDays TLV

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