culture

In November, I went down to Raleigh to meet my team for planning meetings and team building. For a few of my teammates, this is our first face to face interaction with each other ever. My boss wisely gave us a relatively simple assignment. Create a slide sharing what we’ve done this year and want to do next year (which I’ll share to an extent in a later post). Create another slide listing three things that make us who we are (born in a unique place, grew up on a farm, etc....

I have mentioned this a few times in various talks, on social media, and in my newsletter; the importance of psychological safety in creating effective teams is often overlooked. Google did an enormous amount of research to determine, “the secrets of effective teams at Google.” Code-named Project Aristotle, Google wanted to nail down, once and for all, what factors contributed to team effectiveness. The number one contributor to team effectiveness at Google was surprising at the time; psychological safety....

I went to DevOpsDays Atlanta for the first time this week. I hadn’t been in Atlanta in a very long time. It sure has changed a ton. Originally, I was going to help run the SJ Technologies booth. But, a speaker had to back out at the last minute and I was asked to fill the spot. I was working on a talk for ChefConf so I quickly finished that up and gave it to the good folks at DevOpsDays Atlanta....

Abstract Over the past 500 years, there have been 16 cases of a rising power threatening to displace a ruling power. 75% of those cases resulted in war. Although your organizational transformation probably won’t lead to war, it could be contentious. History can help prevent conflict when driving change. This talk will analyze human tendencies, historical data, and provide real-world examples of how to avoid conflict during your DevOps journey....

This talk has been deprecated and remains for reference Abstract With the need to build, test and release software more rapidly, frequently and reliably the concept of DevOps has never been more popular, and to a degree, more misunderstood. DevOps skills are consistently highly sought after and in huge demand, yet at the same time little education and training is available in both the professional world and in higher education....

Abstract People think that DevOps, Cloud Native, Agile, GROWS, etc. are all rainbows and roses. You start small, work your way up or you decide as an organizational unit to change. These are two patterns associated with a Jedi-type maturation process of DevOps. Like in Star Wars, DevOps has a dark side. This talk provides examples of successful and failed DevOps transformations as well as some lessons learned along the way....

Abstract Before DevOps was coined an entire branch of the US military was living by its core fundamentals. Visualizing work, flow, diversity, failing fast are all things that I practiced in the Air Force from 1999 to 2010. I’d like to share my lessons learned serving during this time. This talk will broaden people’s view of how DevOps can be implemented, why diversity matters in DevOps, and how fortunate we all are to have the problems we have today....

I had the opportunity to attend and speak at Open Source 101 at NC State’s McKimmon Center for Extension & Continuing Education this past weekend. It’s always nice to visit Raleigh, NC and Red Hat Tower. I met several awesome attendees and speakers while I was in town too. The All Things Open team did an absolutely fantastic job at every facet of this conference. If you have the opportunity to attend one of these events you most definitely should!...