Josh Smith
Enterprise Architect
Josh has been in in IT for 15 years, as a developer, lead dev, tech lead, architect, and enterprise architect. He's worked on big teams, small teams, and been on a team of one. In the process of all of this, he's learned a ton, and he loves to mentor and share that information.
He also loves strategy – laying out plans and figuring out dependencies, which order to do things in. Included in this is a deep love of the complicated business + people + culture + tech (especially tech that makes people's lives easier) of IT strategy.
Presentations
How to Technology Good - Tips for Implementation at Scale
Tuesday, 1:30 PM EST
Want to bring in [new cool thing X] or [necessary technology change Y] to your company, because you know there's a need for it? GOOD IDEA! Except…now what? If your company is more than about 3 people, how do you explain, enable, and encourage the adoption of this change, especially if it will require some work on everyone’s part?
In How to Technology Good, Josh and Laine will explain how bringing in technology is subject to one of the biggest problems in IT - how to scale it. They'll also talk about tips and tricks for how to be as successful as you can, and the main things to keep track of and watch out for. They'll go through each phase of bringing in new tech, all the way from how to pick your success criteria through what to think about when it comes to maintenance.
The Business Agility Treasure Map: Charting a Course to Continuous Delivery
Tuesday, 3:15 PM EST
All companies are IT companies. Except…not. All companies SHOULD be IT companies, if they're trying to keep up with the weight of their customers' ever-increasing demands for speed and agility. Unfortunately…most companies don't know how to get there - or even what “there” looks like, or how they'd describe it.
Josh and Laine will talk about how to use a diagram (in this case, a map!) to build and discuss a strategy to navigate the high seas of being a business today in order to deliberately find the treasure. The treasure (continuous delivery) gives IT, and companies, the ability to embrace and empower existing resources, and eventually will give enough resources to thrive even at the lightning-fast pace of being a business today.
To Hug or to Strangle: Tips for Dealing with Monolith Pain
Tuesday, 5:00 PM EST
A long time ago, in a land far far away, there were monoliths. These fabled artifacts brought consistency and stability to the land - but there was a cost in speed, agility, time, and development pain.
Whether Java EE, .NET, or something else, the big ol' integrated plexi-purpose binaries or yore (and also now…) have grown into problems that hurt developers, architects, and the execution of business goals.
In this talk, Josh and Laine will talk specifics about the pain points of monoliths, and the various strategies they've seen to alleviate that pain.
Kubernetes Platform Security: A framework to think about it and some practical advice
Thursday, 9:00 AM EST
Containers enable rapid development and rapid software delivery - and with that increase in speed comes a need to shift how people think about and tackle security. Running those containers is part of this consideration - the platform and container orchestration has to figure out and handle all of the moving parts.
In this talk, Laine and Josh will give their recommendations for Kubernetes as a platform to run containers. They'll go through talking about security from the perspective of the pieces that make up the container - the ingredients, and how it runs in addition to where it runs. They'll discuss application and platform boundaries while explaining a simple model to use in order to think about and discuss this complex topic.
One of Us – the Importance of Community in Culture Change
Thursday, 1:30 PM EST
If companies truly want to go FAST, occasionally that requires changing something about the culture of the company. Processes get stale or overly complex, people don’t know why things are the way they are, and everyone wonders at the wisdom of asking too many questions.
Culture change is hard, and in this talk we’ll explain the most important piece of surviving and even finding JOY in it – having a strong, supportive community.
But I Don't WANNA - Protecting Your Resources as a Skilled Knowledge Worker
Thursday, 3:15 PM EST
We work in IT – and while we WORK with computers, we do not always FUNCTION like computers where inputs consistently make the same outputs. Our jobs are mostly theory and design and strategy, with some good old fashioned implementation thrown in – and as skilled knowledge workers, we function best when we respect that our mental and emotional resources matter.
In this talk, we’ll explain some of the best practices we’ve stumbled across for personal (brain and heart) resource maintenance.