Josh Klein
Senior Integration Advisor @ Harness Software
Detroit, Michigan, United States
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Josh is a Senior Integration Advisor at Harness Software, where he helps customers implement and scale software for controlled deployments and experimentation. He has 15 years of experience as an Integration Engineer and Solutions Architect. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Penn State.
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Feature Flags: Release without Fear
Over the past few decades, agile software development as a mindset has changed the industry from top to bottom. Delivering working feature increments on a regular schedule is now the expected model for high performance software engineering organizations.
However - some features are bigger than what can be accomplished in one sprint. And moreover what happens when a code deployment cause performance degradation and needs to be rolled back, and quickly? How can features deployment be controlled safely and with confidence? What if you wanted to deploy a feature to just a small subset of your users? Or a big subset?
Enter the humble feature flag. These booleans as a service can wrap code and be used to target what code gets released, and to whom. They allow for nearly instantaneous rollbacks and ramp-ups of feature deployments, slicing and dicing a user base in a multitude of ways.
Excited to learn more?
Join me in this session as I discuss the finer points of feature flagging.
Feature flagging in a microservices architecture
Microservice architectures have shown themselves to be resilient, easier to scale, modify, and deploy - it has become the modern standard for software architecture.
Modern software development also relies on CI/CD pipelines to continually deploy code in a "dark" state - ahead of the features that will use the code.
This session will go over using Split's synchronizer tooling to serve feature flags at scale in a microservices environment.
Why Software Architecture Matters
Over the past two decades, Agile and the have strongly and deeply influenced the software development process at almost all levels and organizations. Many groups have shown huge gains and happy customers from Agile approaches; we’re not here to denigrate that. And no one in their right mind today would promote the BDUF (big design up front) model as the be-all and end-all of creating a modern, high-performance, highly available and fault tolerant system. There are just too many unknowns at the beginning. It’s why Agile works so well!
Without a documented architecture though, you can lie victim to the bus factor. In other words, it creates problems of unshared knowledge and unknown points of failure. If someone critical were to leave the project or the company, how could you maintain continuity without their knowledge? Moreover, you also want to make sure the system you are going to build is fit for purpose—that it meets the primary goals of what you are setting out to achieve by building it in the first place. Even if the first delivery of code or first few deliveries of code don’t satisfy all requirements—and they most certainly won’t—you want to track toward a design that does.
Join me in my discussion as we talk about "Why Architecture Matters"
FrAgile - lessons from a failed agile transformation
Many of us have had the experiences of big changes promised by agile transformations. Move Faster! More Efficient!
Sometimes - however - it doesn't go very well.
Imagine you're the engineer on the team picked to be scrum master. Big new changes sweeping the organization. Sounds fun, right? The even send you off to get certified.
But now you've got to deliver. And moreover - what if you weren't the most senior engineer on the team? How do you interact with a person who likes things as they were? What happens when the winds shift in upper management and agile is no longer a priority? How can you tell if it ever was?
Join me as I dissect the contours of a failed agile transformation. I'll talk about the factors that lead to our team falling back into a semi-waterfall process in perpetuity, and what I would have done differently, given the chance to do it again.
The elephant in the room - how to get to trunk based development
Trunk based development combined with a mature CI/CD pipeline is the gold standard for teams that want to release software fast and continually.
However - it can be daunting to know where to start.
What if you release monthly (or less!) and have significant cross team dependencies? What if you've got manual QA teams, automated tests that nobody trusts, CAB boards, and so many hurdles to climb just to get anything across the line into production?
Where, and how, do you start?
Join me in this session on trunk based development and how to take the first steps to modernize and simplify your production deployments.
Feature Flags and GenAI - parameterization and experimentation
"Feature Flags and GenAI: Parameterization and Experimentation" is a forward-looking talk that explores the intersection of feature flagging—a technique for enabling or disabling features in software without deploying new code—and Generative AI (GenAI) technologies. The discussion delves into how developers can leverage feature flags to manage and experiment with AI-driven features in a controlled environment. It covers the basics of parameterization, which allows for the dynamic adjustment of GenAI model parameters based on real-time user feedback and operational metrics. The talk emphasizes the importance of experimentation, showcasing how feature flags enable A/B testing and canary releases, thus facilitating iterative improvements and risk mitigation in deploying GenAI capabilities. Practical examples and best practices are provided to illustrate how to effectively integrate feature flags with GenAI projects, aiming to enhance user experiences while ensuring robustness and scalability in software applications.
DevopsDays Detroit 2023 Sessionize Event
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Agile & Beyond 2023 Sessionize Event
Josh Klein
Senior Integration Advisor @ Harness Software
Detroit, Michigan, United States
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