Interview: Darren Lewis, Experian, DevOps Excellence Awards finalist
"We empower consumers and our clients to manage their data with confidence."
DevOps is an evolving framework that promotes quicker, better application development and the faster delivery of new or changed software features or products to clients.
Computing's DevOps Excellence Awards showcase outstanding achievements from organisations, personalities and solutions that have successfully applied DevOps methodologies.
This year's winners will be announced at a live awards ceremony on Tuesday, 14 March in London.
One of the finalists is Experian, which has reached the shortlist for two categories: DevOps Professional of the Year and Best Implementation of DevSecOps.
We caught up with Darren Lewis - principal engineer at Experian and a finalist for DevOps Professional of the Year category - to find out what makes his company different from other technology firms.
Darren is a software engineer with 16 years' experience and has worked for Experian for nearly 8 years. He enjoys learning new things, but more so sharing knowledge with others and helping them overcome complex problems.
In recent years he has taken a keen interest in developer experience and as such, this has led him down the path of DevOps/DevSecOps. He loves the challenge of identifying and fixing problems to make people's lives better than they were yesterday.
Outside of work, Darren loves watching F1 and playing golf. He is married with a 2-year-old son who loves to watch his dad "type type type".
Computing: Please provide some background on your company for our readers.
Darren Lewis: Experian is the world's leading global information services company. During life's big moments - from buying a home or a car, to sending a child to college, to growing a business by connecting with new customers - we empower consumers and our clients to manage their data with confidence. We help individuals to take financial control and access financial services, businesses to make smarter decisions and thrive, lenders to lend more responsibly, and organisations to prevent identity fraud and crime.
What makes you different from other technology companies?
Everything we do is rooted in helping people, whether that's our customers or our employees.
Hearing feedback from colleagues in our call centre who speak to our customers really drives home the impact we can have to their lives, and our NPS score in the mid 80's really shows how seriously we take that responsibility.
Internally, we constantly focus on improving our processes from our Security First mindset all the way through to developer experience. This has really helped to make lasting and tangible changes for the better for all of our teams and ultimately our customers too.
What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?
We had a requirement to delete Docker images from our repositories that had been superseded within a given timeframe, which meant combing through over 35,000 images. The original process from the Infosec team was to request permission and then manually delete images one by one, which was risky, error-prone and very resource intensive, sometimes taking weeks to delete a single image due to permissions not working correctly.
Having identified this was a poor experience for the teams, we created a tool to quickly and safely delete images for the teams instead. It had multiple safety checks built in, audited everything it did and even had a test mode so teams could feel confident using it and didn't have to worry about deleting the wrong image by accident and causing an outage.
As a result, the teams are happier because the experience has been dramatically improved, and they are spending significantly less time deleting images. Infosec are happy because the images are deleted, and we didn't have a single instance of an image being deleted that shouldn't have been.
For me, this is an example that sits right at the heart of what DevOps is about - improving efficiency, reducing risk and enhancing the experience for our teams.
What are you working on this year?
One of my main objectives is to create a one-stop shop developer portal for the teams. We have so much information that we need to be aware of, for example, service documentation, code quality metrics, test/security results, CI/CD status, observability metrics, etc. All this is spread throughout multiple systems and is hard to collate together. I'm hoping that creating a developer portal for the teams to house all this information in one easy to navigate portal will significantly improve their experience and improve their efficiency.
Why are events like the DevOps Excellence Awards important to the IT industry?
I really believe that knowledge is power and that it should be shared. Having events like the DevOps Excellence Awards allows people to showcase their great products/people to the industry and to help those that are facing similar challenges. Getting to grips with DevOps can really unlock a company's potential to deliver value quickly and safely to their customers. If we can all move the needle forwards in this area, then everyone can benefit from it, all the way from the CEO's at the top IT organisations all the way down to your Nanna using an app to order her prescription.
DevOps Excellence Awards will take place on 14th March in London. Click here to view the shortlist and here to book your table.