Blog

Red Hat invited me to speak at DevNationFederal. The organizers requested I present my DevOps is Not War talk to technologists in the Washington DC area. This crowd is a group of folks that are at varying points in their DevOps journeys. Many folks from government agencies and systems integrators were present. I was able to sync up with one of my Airmen from my time at Pope Air Force Base. He was fascinated by Ansible, Kubernetes, and showed particular interest in the concepts of DevOps. He works for a siloed systems integrator and was curious how he could help influence change from within. I gave him a ton of advice and offered to help him implement Ansible playbooks and roles in his workcenter. It was pretty damn cool. ...

I was lucky enough to be selected to speak at DevOpsDays Toronto. This was my first trip into Canada and I have to admit, it was amazing! The city of Toronto is a very diverse city teeming with culture. The speaker dinner was at a wonderful restaurant Eastern Mediterrean restaurant, Byblos. If you are ever in Toronto, I suggest you go to Byblos and get the Turkish Manti Dumplings. I don’t typically enjoy eggplant but these dumplings are superb! ...

If you read DevOps’ish, you already know I spoke at ChefConf 2018. I was able to meet 1,400 new friends while I was in Chicago (not really but kinda). I presented my talk, DevOps is Not War to a standing room only audience. From a speaker’s perspective, I have never felt more prepared for a talk. There were speaker office hours every week for 10 weeks before the event to address any questions we may have had. On top of that, Anna Boynton, was available to all speakers to coach us through some of our not so great points. Anna looked at video from DevOpsDays Atlanta 2018 to help me hone the talk to a very tight time slot while hitting every main point needed. ...

I was helping to staff the Cloud Native Computing Foundation booth at ChefConf 2018 when the topic of encouraging folks to write articles about what they’re doing with Kubernetes came up. One common problem often encountered is convincing folks that what they’re doing is interesting work. The next problem is convincing folks that writing is not too difficult. Breaking down the task of writing into three steps is helpful: Outline Proofread Formatting Having an outline is important when writing any work. It doesn’t have to be fancy if the topic is straightforward for the writer. But, it should exist regardless because it simplifies the writing process. For example, here’s the outline for this article: ...

The opensource.com DevOps Community and The Enterprisers Project teamed up to create the quintessential guide to hiring for DevOps talent. I contributed the Introduction and the article, “DevOps hiring strategies to attract top talent”. This was a significant amount of work from all parties and I love how quickly and beautifully it came together. Hats off to Jason Hibbets and the folks at Red Hat that helped put this together. To discuss attracting talent I brough in a fantastic recruiter to bounce questions off of; Ken M. Middleton. I met Ken during my job search last year. He’s a pretty awesome person and one of the only recruiters I can legitimately recommend for DevOps folks. ...