Sharing: What's in it for me!?

Sharing. It’s one of the four pillars of CAMS. We consume so much shared content but have we ever thought about sharing from the point of view of the Sharer? Why should I share? If I’m constantly sharing information what do I get out of it? What’s in it for me!?

This lightning talk looks at sharing through the eyes of a Sharer. What benefits do they receive out of sharing? What cultural or psychological benefits are there?

Transforming your DevOps dams into fast-flowing aqueducts

So here you are. You've been "doing the DevOps" for a while but something feels wrong. It's working great in some teams but not in others; you're still delivering value to the organisation quickly but you know you can go faster. Why does it feel like your journey has stalled?

Puppet has been gathering data about DevOps for over 7 years and we've learnt a lot - and yet a common question we still get asked is "How do we scale our DevOps success more broadly across the business?". The findings in our latest State of DevOps report show there are five foundational practices important for growth, including deployment pattern reuse and configuration management, all of which are dependent on sharing!

In this talk I will explore these foundational practices and give practical advice on how teams and leaders can leverage sharing their current DevOps successes to stop their evolution from stagnating.

D&D&D : Playing games to be a better engineer

"You enter a room from the South. It is dimly lit. You see a log file on the floor. You pick it up. You read a Warning and an Error. What do you do?"

Dungeons and Dragons, and many other tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) are a lot of fun, but they also practice key skills needed for software engineering, whether you're in Dev, Ops or any other role!

In this ignite talk we'll explore the aspects of Systems Mastery, Communication, Empathy, Collaboration, Resource Management and Lateral Thinking and how playing games can level up your real-life character.

Beyond Pester 101: Applying testing principles to PowerShell

We see a lot talks on testing PowerShell with Pester, but are the tests we write good tests? What makes a test “good”? How do we measure how effective our tests are? This talk will help you answer these questions, including why testing is important and how to apply these principles to your project.

I have given this talk at the PowerShell global summit and at various meetups. It is considered a really good talk on introducing software testing to a more scripting or IaC developer audience that typically don't think about these things.

Documentation is UX! - Change my mind

We spend a lot of time designing beautiful websites and tools; Crafting the perfect onboarding experiences for our users. Obsessing over colours and buttons and fonts, and yet ... why is writing the user documentation always left to last? and why is it always so difficult? and why does it not spark joy in our users?

This talk will look at the importance of documentation for your web based and CLI tools (because it'll be the first thing they go looking for when something goes wrong!) and will give tips on how to create the three types (and many forms) of product documentation so that users will truly enjoy the UX you created for them.

Beyond Pester 103: Applying a Testing Mindset

Pester is a great tool. You’ve probably used it for unit and acceptance testing, but you feel there’s something missing; How much more is there to testing? Is it just making sure my script works? It’s time to look at how testing can be used in everything (well almost everything…) you do!

In my last two talks “Beyond Pester 101: Applying testing principles to PowerShell” and “Beyond Pester 102: Acceptance testing with PowerShell” I really focused on testing in of itself. But there’s so much more to being in a Testing Mindset. Software pipelines, VM images, audit scripts and so on, can all benefit from the skills of thinking like a tester.

Topics:

What is a testing mindset?
Always be thinking of testing!
… but you don’t always have to test

Why should scripters and IT Pros care about testing?
Immediate benefits
The cost of untested PowerShell
Long term happiness

What tools can help me?
You mean there’s more than just Pester?
Whirlwind tour of some of the places where having a testing mindset can help you
Practical examples of applying a testing mindset as an IT Pro or scripter

This is the longform session from my lightning session at https://youtu.be/SoYa_NolSFc?t=2916