The Engineering Psyche: A Thought Experiment

I think it's fair to say that the last 12-18 months of constant upheaval in our industry has made a lot of folks uncomfortable and less than optimistic about the role of the engineer moving forward. In this session, I intend on reviewing a few observations I've had about this latest paradigm shift, how it relates to technology shifts from the past, and how we collectively can use this to our advantage to disrupt an already disrupted market. As a result, this session will challenge you to look at how you tell your story and describe what you're capable of in a world where change is almost outpacing itself every couple of months.
Included in this session are two exercises: one is mapping what you've done over the past week into different functional areas we technologists tend to live in, and the other is a larger experiment asking attendees to reimagine their own brand and share reworded summaries or bios that reflect this change in thought.

Cloud Infrastructure for Developers

Developing applications can be challenging enough—and now you have to worry about where it gets deployed as well? In this session, we will cover some basics of cloud infrastructure, how to test against local and cloud based resources, and how to figure out what services will work best for your application. Using a code first approach, you’ll learn how to codify those services and tie it all together with build and release scripts.

Overcoming Technology Indecision

There are a wide variety of different technology patterns, development languages, hardware configurations, cloud services, data models...phew! Understanding them all is a challenge unto itself, but finding what fits best for your project or organization can be a separate challenge altogether. In this talk, I illustrate common-sense methodologies for choosing programming languages, design patterns, implementation patterns, as well as how to get started with selecting appropriate cloud services to get the job done.

Fault Driven Development

Failure IS an option! Developing cloud-first applications can be fundamentally different than building traditional on-prem applications. As a cloud app developer, you need to be prepared for and expect failures in your code as well as in your app environment. This session will arm you with tools to be proactive with fault tolerance and reactive with fault handling.

Azure DevOps vs. DevOps on Azure

Unfamiliar with Azure DevOps Services? Not sure of where to start with DevOps for the Azure cloud platform? This session will summarize the different verticals within Azure DevOps Services, covering the basics along with new features and functionality, and will also cover the wider topic of DevOps on Azure.
Toolchains and programming languages do not need to be replaced with Microsoft-specific products. Many integration scenarios exist with popular non-Microsoft toolsets, including:
- Jenkins
- TeamCity
- Bamboo
- Bitbucket
- GitLab
- Octopus Deploy
This session moves at a brisk pace and assumes general knowledge of development concepts such as source control management, continuous integration, continuous delivery/deployment, and distributed systems.

Clown Migration Plan

This session is geared toward addressing the biggest challenge faced when attempting to successfully cultivate a DevOps culture and undergo a digital transformation: people. From inconsistent communication to lack of vision, from saboteurs to resume builders, we will cover several types of personas who you most likely will run into during the course of your transformation. Identifying common pitfalls (and not-so-common ones too), we will inspect what to look for and how to get all teams working together toward a common goal.

Practical Dev Containers (and Codespaces)

Simplify how your teams work! Using shared configurations and underlying tools makes onboarding new developers easier and removes friction from the development process. In this talk, we examine using GitHub Codespaces for capturing base development environment requirements, integrating tools such as precommit and checkov, integrated custom CodeSpaces image management, OS edge cases, and isolated/confidential uses.

Relevance: The flexibility and power of Codespaces allows individual developers and teams alike to make starting a new project easier as well as collaborating on improvements to shared developer environment configurations. This leads to faster onboarding and lowers the bar to being productive in a software development project.

Case Studies or Examples: The primary example is centered around developer onboarding and time to productivity. Many regulated industries struggle with securing containerized technologies for their developers when their technology is extremely locked down or even air-gapped. Having ways to enable collaborative functionality (Codespaces and consequently DevContainers) makes this more attainable while still giving risk and compliance teams peace of mind. Another example is OS usage. Not everyone uses Ubuntu, Debian, or Alpine. There are segments that work exclusively with CentOS for legacy support but switched to RHEL or a similar Linux flavor, and support for that in the devcontainer features ecosystem is not at parity with Ubuntu/Debian.

Key Takeaways:
- Discover simple, as well as advanced, methods for streamlining configuration to facilitate developer productivity
- Gain insights into off-label or divergent use cases related to custom Codespaces images, configurations, and features
- Understand how to position themselves to have conversations with other teams on how to implement this functionality while still maintaining a secure and compliant posture