Talks

I helped organize and spoke at DevOpsDays Raleigh 2017 back in September. From an organizers perspective the team was fantastic! If you ever have the opportunity to organize an event with any of the fine organizers in Raleigh you will be learning from true professionals. From a speaker’s perspective it was a blast. I had the opportunity to convert my article The Dark Side of DevOps into a talk. While it went very well I wish I could have elaborated more on it in the future. There is so much story to tell! But, I held back a little because in the audience there were former co-workers who had been on these journeys with me. ...

Ignite talks are a special talk format: 5 minute talks consisting of 20 slides which auto advance every 15 seconds. It’s a really neat talk format. In Ignite Karaoke, the slides auto advance, but there are only 5 slides per talk, except you have no idea what your slides will look like! It leads to some pretty funny improv. Source: DevOpsDays Raleigh 2017 Ignite Karaoke (Part 2) Download as MP4 (right click, Save As…) ...

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. ...

Video of all the GopherCon 2017 talks are now available. Fifty-eight videos in all; it’s almost like being there. You can watch Ashley McNamara’s goosebump inducing talk, Kris Nova’s refreshing take on purging technical debt from kops, or Sam Boyer’s dep talk. My lightning talk, Golang to the rescue: Saving DevOps from TLS turmoil, is also available. Give it a watch when you have a moment. Hats off to the organizers for getting these videos up so quickly. It feels like I just got back from Denver. The quality of the videos and the speed at which they were made available lends great credit to all involved in the production efforts. ...

On Tuesday, May 23, 2017, I did a DevOps talk at Open Source South Carolina. The talk was a DevOps 101-styled deep dive into DevOps. Since the number one question I get when talking about DevOps, in general, is “where do I start?” I added my “The Three Things” to the already well known “Three Ways”. This provided both the holistic view while guiding people needed an extra nudge down the DevOps path. ...