Questions for 2023-07-20: Judson Lester | DevOps Manager

Testing

Testing every part of development can require a large time investment. How do you prioritize which areas to focus testing on when rushing to ship products?
Should all projects practice Test Driven Development (TDD)?
Given a hypothetical scenario where you find yourself in a large codebase without unit tests or integration tests, what would you suggest some action steps are?
Different areas of development require various testing tools (e.g. front end could use cypress, backend flask apps could use pytest, etc). Do you have a list of suggested, "tried-and-true" tools to use for different parts of the tech stack: frontend, backend, cloud, security, etc.?

What high ROI CI/CD practices could everyone go home and put to practice immediately using GitHub Actions?
Can you recall a time where you had to scale a system and discuss what your approach was?
How can we gain skills and experience scaling systems when most platforms that manage scale require Seniors?
Given your experience in the field, how has your role evolved and how do you see it changing in the upcoming future?
It seems like Docker is a standard tool for all devs - at what point does it make sense to reach for Kubernetes?
To get into systems admin type roles (DevOps) do you first need a large amount of experience in the field? (e.g. { backend : DevOps, Cyber Security : DevSecOps, ML Engineer : MLOps} )

Given your experience working with on-site servers and migrating to cloud (AWS) do you have any thoughts or opinions to share with us on the future of the cloud industry? The past decade shifted the scale heavily towards cloud; could there be a future where companies go back to having on-site servers and only use the cloud for certain services?

How do you choose business partners/co-founders? I feel like this is very difficult because you have to be able to trust the other to fully own separate areas of the business and always act in the best interest of the business.

Regarding testing and DevOps. are there any skills/certs/practices/articles/books that you would suggest are critical to have in the toolbox for junior and mid-level developers? (e.g. AWS certs, practicing unit testing, Docker/K8's, Terraform, etc)