Practice Like You Play

I grew up playing football, and a consistent phrase I always heard was “practice like you play.” There are several different derivatives of this same phrase that have a similar meaning. This was told as a reminder that practicing was preparation for game day and that if you didn’t practice well, you probably wouldn’t play well on game day. My experience is that it’s true. If you didn’t focus on your assignments and know your plays, then you wouldn’t know those on game day. Game day adds extra pressure, big crowds, and unknown opponents. All things that can make you easily distracted or extra nervous which impacts your performance. The more you focused on things in practice, the easier it was to execute on game day.

In my 17 years in the software field, I haven’t always experienced this same approach. We are often asked to do things quickly, skipping steps for a proof of concept, a POC. That POC often gets moved to production. If you didn’t spend the time writing infrastructure as code (also known as IaC), tests, automated build, and an automated deployment, you often don’t get to add that as often promised. Mistakes get made, items are missed, and the rollout is stressful and doesn’t go smoothly.

I’ve slowly started to take the approach of always doing IaC. IaC is slower to start until you’re comfortable with it, but then going from POC or from Dev to multiple new environments is faster, less stress, and more importantly, things aren’t missed and the environments are almost identical.

I often hear speed as the reason to not do IaC or to spend a little extra time to do it right. However, we always seem to have the time to do it twice. I’m going to leave you all with just a question.

How much is that costing us both as a business and personally?

Thanks for reading,

Jamie

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