Matty Stratton
Director of Developer Relations at Aiven
Lisle, Illinois, United States
Matt Stratton is the Director of Developer Relations at Aiven, founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, and the global chair of the DevOpsDays set of conferences.
Matt has over 20 years of experience in IT operations and is a sought-after speaker internationally, presenting at Agile, DevOps, and cloud engineering focused events worldwide. Demonstrating his keen insight into the changing landscape of technology, he recently changed his license plate from DEVOPS to KUBECTL.
He lives in Chicago and has three awesome kids, whom he loves just a little bit more than he loves Diet Coke. Matt is the keeper of the Thought Leaderboard for the DevOps Party Games online game show and you can find him on Twitter at @mattstratton.
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You’ve Convinced Me We Have To Collaborate — But How The Hell Do We Deal With People?
We know that DevOps is about people, empathy, relationships, and collaboration. And science supports that—studies have shown collaboration is critical to effective software development and software operations. But many times, collaboration is easier said than done. Which begs the question: How do we deal with people and learn to work with different personalities?
Don’t worry, we can learn to improve our human interactions. Over time, I’ve learned some techniques and approaches to enhance collaboration and interaction, which I’ll share so you can put them into practice yourself!
Topics covered in this talk include:
De-escalating conflict
Facilitating blameless meetings
Reframing conversations to be more productive
Encouraging psychological safety in teams
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
Startups aren’t the only disruptors that your organization faces. Constantly changing environments and unexpected events such as COVID-19 make it clear that every organization needs to be resilient so they can deliver software faster while providing even more value to customers. In order to express the resilience of the socio-technical system that is your organization, you need to look beyond software development practices alone.
In this talk, we will investigate how global economies have been disrupted in the past, and draw a parallel to the same disruption that containers and cloud now present to modern technology organizations. We will look at the ways that we need to retrain, retool, and rethink to grow stronger and be more effective, and investigate the five elements needed for a true transformation.
The Journey From DevOps to Cloud Engineering
We have been talking about devops for years. Along the way, we’ve added various syllables to the portmanteau “devops” to include all the practices and disciplines that are key to doing this effectively. What if DevOps, DevSecOps, and all the other variants have been about the same idea all along?
Cloud Engineering is an emergent way of expressing how we use and enhance software engineering practices in a cloud world. This goes beyond application design and architecture, but includes how we build, deploy, and manage the services and applications that provide value to our users and customers.
In this talk I will step through the evolution of devops and how the practice of Cloud Engineering is a natural progression. I will take the traditional expression of CALMS (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing) and connect them to the build, deploy, and manage practices reflected in the Cloud Engineering discipline.
Cloud Engineering isn’t “the new DevOps”. It’s the evolution of everything we have been talking about for the last ten years (and more). Let’s learn how we can provide innovation, scale, reliability, security, and compliance by harnessing the practices across all of the associate disciplines. And maybe, along the way, “take DevOps back” to what it’s really been about all this time.
Kubernetes, You Rainbow-Infused Space Unicorn: What Leslie Knope Can Teach Us About DevOps
Leslie Knope inspired us all on the television show, "Parks and Recreation" to be better people and to care about our communities. Under the surface, Leslie was actually providing great insight into what DevOps is all about?
Leslie's wisdom isn't limited to the wonder of waffles and building better parks. In this Ignite, I will offer up some lessons that apply to the practice of building and operating software, as well as effecting change in your company. DevOps is about friends, waffles, and work. Or waffles, friends, and work. But work always comes third.
Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma
When humans are faced with a traumatic experience, our brains kick in with survival mechanisms. These mechanisms are the familiar fight or flight response, but can also include the freeze response - which occurs when we are terrified or feel that there is no chance of escape.
In this talk I will explain the background of fight, flight, and freeze, and how it applies to organizations. Based on my own experiences with post-traumatic stress (PTS), I will give examples and suggestions on how to identify your own organizational trauma and how to help heal it.
Sufferers of post-traumatic stress continue to feel these fight, flight, and freeze responses long after the trauma has passed, because our brains are unable to differentiate between the memory of trauma and an actually occurring event. When activated or triggered, the brain reverts to these behaviors, which are then expressed in the person’s body (through posture, disassociation, muscle tension, etc).
The same can occur to organizations - once an organization has experienced a trauma (a large outage, say) the “memory” of that trauma leads to a deregulated state whenever activated (by symptoms of similar indicators, such as system alerts, customer issues, and more). The organization will insist on revisiting the same fight, flight, or freeze response as the embedded trauma has caused, which, like a triggered post-traumatic stress sufferer, is a false equivalency.
One of the treatments for post-traumatic stress is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), in which the patient’s difficult memories are offset with a positive association that is reinforced through external stimuli. The same can be done for organizations - removing the inaccurate traumatic associations of previous outages and organizational pain through game days, and other techniques, we can reduce the “scar tissue” of our organization and move forward in a balanced manner.
In this talk I will explain the background of fight, flight, and freeze, and how it applies to organizations. I will give examples and suggestions on how to identify your own organizational trauma and how to help heal it.
Avengers Assemble - The Thanos Incident
Over the course of the Avengers storyline, everything has been leading up to the ultimate outage—when Thanos snapped his fingers, eliminating half of all life in the universe.
Come along with me on a journey to perform a retrospective on this greatest of all incidents in the Marvel universe. What were the contributing factors? How could the Avengers have followed better incident response procedures? And can this be reviewed in a truly blameless fashion?
In this talk, I will revisit the storyline across the Marvel Cinematic Universe that led up to a critical event: the “Snap,” when Thanos removes half of all life in the universe at the end of Avengers: Infinity War, as well as the resolution displayed in Avengers: Endgame. We will explore the activities of the incident response teams (the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and more), to discover what they did well, what they could have done better, and why S.H.I.E.L.D. needs to invest in better Incident Response training.
The audience will learn how to engage in productive Incident Response practices, conduct blameless postmortems, and even why a properly used pager (ala Captain Marvel) can be a key element in successfully navigating even the most dire of universal crises.
DeveloperWeek Cloud 2022 Sessionize Event
DevopsDays Detroit 2022 Sessionize Event
Devopsdays Amsterdam 2022 Sessionize Event
Matty Stratton
Director of Developer Relations at Aiven
Lisle, Illinois, United States
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