The Community Journey: A model for the modern Open Source landscape

As many tech companies, especially startups, have started to embrace Open Source Software (OSS), concerns are being raised among contributors, who strive to preserve the essence of OSS, establishing boundaries to prevent the unchecked exploitation of volunteer labour. Because values like transparency and collaboration may be encouraged one day and in direct conflict to the company’s sales strategy the next, this tension can result in conflicts within not only organisations but also oneself.

After nearly a decade of working with and for the OSS community, I’ve developed the Community Journey model, proving that running a profitable business does not need to be to the detriment of the health of the community.

In this talk, I will discuss common issues community managers face and show how to use the Community Journey as a framework to create sustainable marketing and DevRel strategies, while providing tangible and measurable value to the business.

Owning the Stage

Have you ever wanted to be on stage, but feel uncomfortable in front of many people? Or are you already a speaker and would like to improve your stage presence? Then this is the workshop for you!

Folks often underestimate how the way you carry yourself can make all the difference between an engaging talk and a total snoozefest. And this isn’t only relevant to public speaking. But any face to face interactions like meetings or social gatherings can benefit from a bit of “stage presence”.

In this workshop, we will learn how to be truly present and connect with our bodies, packed with exercises and games, commonly used in theatre productions. So at your next presentation, you can use these techniques to draw in your audience.

Navigating the depth of App Delivery through memes

The CNCF TAG app delivery supports projects and initiatives related to delivering cloud-native applications, including building, packaging, deploying, managing, and operating them, in short: almost everything. Plus, with the rapid advancement in technology and delivery patterns, we regularly have to redraw the line where development stops and delivery starts. If there even is one.
With the help of the iceberg meme we can illustrate the contrast between widely known aspects of a subject (above the waterline) and its deeper, less known complexities (below the waterline).
Let’s take a look at how deep exactly this rabbit hole goes to understand how and why everything is app delivery and why you need to care about that.

The DevOps Improv Session

This session has no abstract. It's unique every single time.
We will play improv games with the audience like "Three-headed DevOps consultant" or "World‘s Worst DevOps Engineer" to poke fun at the state of the industry.
This session requires audience participation.

Systems Thinking for Dev Organisations

Systems thinking has been a hot button topic inside and outside the tech industry, as it promises a straightforward and structured approach to make sense of the world and its complexities. By looking at systems in terms of elements and their relationships, Systems Thinkers can understand and predict behaviors, as well as affect long-lasting change.
Understanding that tech organizations, dev teams and their individual members are themselves systems, following their own purposes and structures, can help us better support developers in their goals.

In this talk, we will learn about the basics and mechanisms that inform systems thinking. We will look at examples from the real world to understand why systems behave the way they do and how we can enable change. Finally, we will adapt what we learned to development organizations and discuss how systems thinking can help us improve developer efficiency and happiness.

GitOps for the people

MoneyBank Inc. is a fintech enterprise that recently made the jump to K8s and GitOps to cope with the shift of demands from cranking out features towards stability and scalability. Yet, even with a fully automated CICD and shiny new microservices, features still take weeks to be released. As teams keep waiting on each other, frustrations, resentment, and mistrust grow.

MoneyBank’s situation is typical for organizations with enterprise processes and startup mindsets. When faced with problems, the urge is often to move fast and automate them away. However, the cultural and regulatory structures to support these changes are not in the scope of said automation. One more piece is missing to address the needs of non-technical stakeholders within the ever-changing CICD landscape.

In this talk, we will attempt to automate the non-automatable with ReleaseOps: GitOps for the people.

https://lianmakesthings.dev/talk/gitops-for-the-people/

Make space, don't take space

When I began my career in tech, I was aimless.
I was a decent software developer, but I wasn’t overly passionate about technology X or paradigm Y.
One day, I decided to try my luck at proposing a talk to a conference and that kicked off a chain of events that led me to where I am now. Being part of a community gave me the confidence and courage to live my truth and allowed me to work on things that matter to me.
Today I work to extend the same opportunities to others.
With Corona, we have been given more opportunities but are also facing new challenges, like balancing global reach with local content.

If you’d like to peek behind the curtain of a community event which tries to stay true to our mission of being diverse, inclusive and locally relevant, this is the talk for you

Secret Management: The Soft Way

Secrets. Security best-practices mandate that they stay away from the code—or else! And that’s what we did for a long time.
But as CI/CD practices evolved, for a myriad of reasons, we now want to ship the code, the environment, and the secrets, all in one lump. So, we can’t hide the secrets anymore… unless?

Tools like HashiCorp Vault attempt to address this by managing secrets outside the delivery chain. Great! But you can’t use those inside local dev environments, so… When that’s precisely what you need to do, then what?

In this talk, Lian will show the audience how to manage secrets the GitOps way, so you can maintain security best-practices while also being able to use them in your local environment for development. Sound like magic? That’s because it is.

After this talk, the audience will be able to understand secret management solutions that work seamlessly in a variety of environments.

In a Land Before Metrics: Embracing the Art of Uncertainty

After almost 16 years in the tech industry, I finally had enough of the never-ending grind and quit my job to pursue performance art. I've ended up with a transformative experience that questioned many truisms I held.

As an industry, we worship data-driven decision-making. We believe by collecting vast amounts of data we can machine learn our way to the best outcome. However this approach neglects, that reality is not a petri dish under lab conditions.
In the unpredictable world of live theater, directors don’t optimize for perfect execution, but for the cast’s understanding of the vision. And instead of reproducing the same experience every show, each performance is treated as unique.

How would we view and measure team work, user experience and developer happiness if we applied this mindset to high pressure situations like deployments or feature releases?
Join this talk to find out and learn how to use uncertainty as a canvas on which to be creative, rather than a scenario to avoid.