Today, a lot like yesterday. I got to sit in talks and listen to smart people talk about things they care a lot about. Back to regular life tomorrow, but I'll at least be going back with some new ideas.
James Meickle- KEYNOTE: Beyond Burnout
This was awesome. It was about making your engineering teams more inclusive for our friends/collegues dealing with mental illness as a way to better serve your team(s) as a whole.
Tiffany Longworth - Change Management for Humans
We need to build for specific people. Our change is going to fail if we dont' have a specific target goal. Stakeholders are paramount.
Create your own evangelists!
Flynn - The rise of Layer 7, microservices, and the proxy war with Envoy, NGINX, and HAProxy
This was one of the more technical talks I got to go to. This talk was about how we moved from Monoliths to Decentralized Monoliths to Monoliths (again) and now to Decentralized microservices.
We've been able to vetter decentralize our services by using things like HAPRoxy and Zookeeper, but then all-in-one tools like Envoy came out to simplify comms and increase observability.
Matty Stratton - Everything Is A Product - How To Apply Product Management Practices to Technology Services
It was fun seeing a host of a podcast I actively like and enjoy listening to talk at the conference.
There was a lot of good information in this about how everything we do should be treated as a product with owners and stakeholders. Just because an environment is labelled as Dev or QA or that a tool we've written for internal use, people still rely on it and it needs to be up as much as we can garantee it.
Yegor Bugayenko - Expertise vs Experts
There were things in this talk I didn't agree with, but I think he made a lot of points that were good.
Software is better as manufacturing than art. Art makes things magic and special. Magic and special is unmaintainable. A good engineer is one that can easily be replaced.
Paul Bruce - Progressive Testing to Meet the Performance Imperative
This talk was the biggest bummer. Paul was having A/V issues throughout his entire talk.
Mike Rothmann - Quick and Dirty DevSecOps
Long story short: There is no such thing as Quick and Dirty DevSecOps. We're too often sacrificing security in the name of speed and agility. Mike argued that if we build our software and pipelines with security at the forefront, we don't have to sacrifice anything.
Overall thoughts
Overall, one of my favorite things about this conference was how much emphasis on inclusivity and diversity there was. Whether it was the breakfast they ran for underrepresented groups, or the Keynote this morning where James framed accomodating for people with mental illnesses as a way to make things better for you organization as a whole.
Catering to underrepresented groups is a strength, not a weakness. Homogeneous teams and companies are missing out on valuable input from individuals that you wouldn't normally get.