Third Loop | Ep. #3, Give It a Name: Why Software Needs a Third Loop | Heavybit

James Governor: So giving it a name is really important. That's part of why we wrote Progressive Delivery. There was a movie in the very olden days, and I don't think it's particularly well remembered or anything. It was called Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead.It was about-- There was sort of mafia, and there were some contextual things. "Give it a name" was one of the themes that ran throughout the show. One of the things was boat drinks. So they would talk about boat drinks, and boat drinks was like, you know, you're the mafia, it's the end of your career, and you end up, you know-- Valhalla for the mafia is you in Florida on a boat drinking ridiculous cocktails. And those are the boat drinks, sort of Valhalla.Heidi Waterhouse: Uh-huh.James: One of the themes of this movie was: Giving it a name. A movie about language. And I, who work in the tech industry as an industry analyst, obviously protection rackets, giving it a name, I understand that. It's not generally something that we do, but there may be some firms that do like to give things names.Anyway, the truth is, in tech we coalesce around concepts. It is great to be able to say, "Oh, that. Yeah, I get it. Progressive Delivery. You pull together feature flags and dark launches and the observability to close the loop and all of these other things. This is great. I get it. This is production excellence. Amazing. Progressive Delivery."But the podcast, I think there's something--Kim Harrison: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. James, let's pause. You gave Progressive Delivery a name. For those who may not have heard any other episode, why did you name it Progressive Delivery? Just in one minute or less.James: Basically Sam Guckenheimer from Microsoft Talks about progressive rollouts, something that they did--Adam Zimman: Progressive experimentation, right?James: Progressive experimentation, sorry. It was something that Microsoft have done actually for the longest time. If you think about the blast radius, one of the reasons everybody gets pissed off at Microsoft when they do shit and you know, that may be updating the operating system or anything else, is the blast radius is so big.

Right? You are touching so many people, so everybody knows about it.And so they would do experimentation, they would try things for a subset, a specific cohort of folks before they rolled it out more broadly. And that was, at the time, Azure DevOps. That was what Sam was working on and that was one of their precepts. But a lot of the things about Progressive Delivery is--I mean look, smoke tests are not new, canarying is not new, blue-green's not new. But packaging altogether with the capabilities of the cloud from an abundance perspective, amazing automation coming at it from an alignment perspective, that's Progressive Delivery. So naming things is just super important and enables people to understand stuff.And that was-- The progressive clicked. I've been thinking about all this basket of things and I didn't have a name for what CICD looked like if you'd done the Internet for 15 years, right?Adam: Yeah. This was where you know like when you and I started talking it was, we both had the same problem. We needed something to call it so that it was consistent, as much as consistency happens in tech, to make sure that when we said something we didn't have to go into the hour long explanation.James: 100%, and we said, going into an hour long conversation.Heidi: Haha. I also want to say, I had been talking about the difference between release and delivery and that putting something out was not the same as people accepting it.James: 100%. I think we sort of, as time went on, there were times when Adam became a bit worried. "Wait, we call it progressive? I mean in this post woke era, will it be okay?"But I think A, fuck the haters and B yeah, so the idea of progressive rollouts, so being able to limit the blast radius, it came together really well. And, and yeah, I think naming is important and Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, think up Progressive Delivery. I mean, you know, like that's a boat drinks, it's a Valhalla. Right?This is the amazing thing that happens when you improve your culture and improve the platforms you use and are able to deliver the right product to the right person at the right time, the right user at the right time.

Kim: So I think that brings us really neatly into the naming of this podcast. Right? Everything the three of you have said--James: It's almost like we had a plan, Kimberly. Haha.Adam: So another kind of side quest is that one of the books that I really enjoyed, kind of fantasy fiction was Patrick Rothfuss, Name of the Wind. If you like fantasy books, great book. But the general premise, or one of the underlying currents is: Knowing the name of the thing gives you control over it.James: Oh, yes. In Magic, that is absolutely a thing.Adam: There's this certain aspect of this that I think kind of resonates with me in terms of how we thought about naming, and when it came to the naming of the podcast. Right? I think there were a couple things that converged on that name. Right?James: I mean, we can definitely talk Ursula Le Guin and naming things and giving them power. I'm ready for that conversation. 100%.Heidi: Madeleine L'Engle. Yeah.Adam: Yeah, exactly. I think, persistent theme.James: Names do have power.Adam: Yeah. And I think that when we were thinking about this and when we were working our way through the book, there was definitely this aspect of, to Heidi's point, like, I think this was something that Heidi kind of came back to again and again that forced us all to think a little bit more about-- You know, in DevOps, we'd been talking about the separation from deployment and release. Right?And that was a huge part of the notion of how do you get something built and then how do you get it so that it's running and operating? Right? And that was the segmentation between developer and operator.But the realization was that there's actually something that happens between the running of a thing and the acceptance or the adoption of a thing. And I think that that was where we came around to this idea that there's another loop.James: Wait, are we gonna name the podcast, Adam?Heidi:We're gonna call it the Third Loop because we feel like when we broke down the wall between Dev and Ops, it was transformative, and it gave us so much insight into how the other half lived.

But as we did that, we came to realize that there was another wall that we needed to break down, and that was between the software makers and the software users.And if we can break that down and say, people who use software are an essential part of the software experience, like, we are not giving them this from on high. This is a collaboration, and if they don't use it, our software means nothing.So we need to break down that next wall between people who make software and people who use software. And the way to do that is to be able to actually not only listen to them but to see how they're using the software.Adam: And I think an interesting point about that Heidi, is that something that we've talked a lot about is the idea that when software was isolated to a power tool that certain segments of the population would use to accomplish very maybe career or job specific tasks, there was an aspect of natural alignment that took place between the software developers and the software users in terms of, it was a specialized thing.I think the thing that has accelerated and exacerbated the need for this breaking down of this third wall is the fact that software is everywhere now.And so all of a sudden-- I think every single one of us has the experience of someone in our lives that is completely non-technical to the point where they would not have a phone or any type of digital devices if they didn't need to, to participate in society. And they've been confronted with a challenge where something has changed at the software level that they have been ill equipped or incapable of being able to navigate themselves.James: Are you talking about healthy people, Adam?Adam: I'm talking about healthy people. But you know, this is the thing is that when software's in your car, when software's in your house--Heidi: Tractor.Adam: Your tractor. A ll of a sudden you can't avoid it. And I think that the challenge there is that when the software maker is inflicting updates on their users as opposed to thinking of it as a coordinated kind of relationship and sharing, you run the risk of doing real harm, physical harm to your users.

James: So for me, yeah like I don't think we fully realized this when we started off on the journey, but it became more and more apparent to us that actually this third loop, including the user in the process, including the user-- You know, if you think about product, which is what we're doing here, it just became more and more obvious that actually the Progressive Delivery and the inclusion of observability, so you have that feedback loop, that Third Loop, I think we all got really excited about that.And to me now, Progressive Delivery. Yeah, the Third Loop's a great way of talking about that, that so much is about understanding the user experience. That's, what are we doing here? We are trying to create delightful experiences that people will get benefit from and I think that, yeah, Dev and Ops, awesome. But how about Dev, Ops and Users? That is the Third Loop.Kim: I want to ask you all some questions about names that almost made it. And I'm going to start off with one of my favorites. We're going to pick on Heidi again because I think we all loved this, but it just didn't quite hit, only because Third Loop was that good. But Never Finished was one of the almost titles.Heidi: Yeah.Kim: And there's some others that we got to get into.Heidi: So Never Finished was an earlier iteration of this idea that:We don't burn software onto CDs anymore. And so because it is ubiquitously deliverable, it's never set, it never stops. There's no real good release point. And we need to accept that software isn't ever finished in a web world because we keep tweaking things. And it's mostly good, but sometimes very difficult.Adam: Well, I think that the other part of this that goes along with Never Finished is the idea that our world doesn't stop.Heidi: Mhm.Adam: And in the context of software, especially now that software is in all the things.