Josh Smith

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.

CRI-O and Buildah and Podman, OH MY. (…and Skopeo, and what on Earth happened with Docker, and……) Containers are really cool, and also useful. Everyone knows it! The open source community has rallied around them and are constantly making improvements and tweaks to their capabilities. But…the tools generated by those open source communities are constantly evolving, and it ends up really hard to keep up on what does what and…why you should care.

Laine and Josh will explain containers as a whole, their lifecycle, and the tools currently among the landscape of awesome. They'll talk about when you should use what, and they'll demo how it all fits together to help with container-based application development and deployment.

We have systems that can tell us in some amount what's wrong with them, but the sheer volume of data, and the sheer volume of systems, make it so that we can't do anything useful with (all of!) that information.

In this talk, Josh and Laine will talk about “wise alerting” to try to understand what both Dev and Ops teams (along with architects and dev/ops management, and even business units) REALLY need to know, along with an overview of their definition of ChatOps, or the idea of systems interacting with people via the chat platforms they use. They'll walk through how to think about parsing and forwarding alerts for maximum efficiency and action-ability, and how to build community via these typically confusing bits of data.

The hardest parts of technology are people and what they do - so, culture and process. In the center of that is how to determine the right amount of oversight when implementing technology or the processes around that technology. That “right amount of oversight” is typically referred to as “governance.”

In this talk, Josh and Laine will explain that there is no one right answer for the right amount of oversight, but there are some best practices to keep in mind. There are also some ways to make it easier to think and talk about governance as a whole, and to deliberately apply it. They'll also go over what the wrong amounts of governance look like and give some tips about how to try to correct it when you see it.

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.

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.

What exactly does it mean to be “not a cultural fit” for an organization? Is it a slightly more polite euphemism for “that person was terrible at their job”? Or maybe, “they had no social skills to speak of”? What happens when it means that it's the organization that's…kind of terrible at their job? What if no one is actually terrible at their job and “not a cultural fit” is a simple statement of fact?

In this talk, Laine and Josh will share the experiences they've collected over the years with multiple organizations, and how the relationship between person and organization can break down. They'll look at why that relationship fails, what it looks like when it's failing, how to salvage it when possible - and when to know it's time to choose something else. They'll also talk about how to find where you DO belong, either within an organization or outside of it.

This session is intended to be mostly discussion, but please also feel welcome if you just want to listen.

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.

Hey! Hey! Hey!

The world around us exists as a collection of events - things that happen and data points that we take in and process and decide what to do about (or not do about), all the time, every day. So…why shouldn't the systems we interact with be structured in the same way?

In this session, Laine and Josh will explain event-driven architecture, and why it's different from traditional monolith and also microservice architecture. They'll explain the pros and cons, and go over some of the technology that's currently out there to implement systems in this more customer-centric way.

Serverless! Functions as a service! DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION!

…just kidding.

One of the ideas in IT that's been gathering buzz for a while is “serverless.” Or sometimes “functions as a service,” used interchangeably. And…okay, but what does that actually mean? And…how does it help what you're trying to accomplish in your organization?

In this talk, Josh and Laine talk about what serverless is, and what it isn't, along with why you should care and how it can help with actual “digital transformation.” They'll go over the benefits and drawbacks of this method of implementing applications and show a demo of how it works using Knative (https://knative.dev/) on a Kubernetes cluster.

There is pain inherent in development - monoliths, confusing deployment processes, conflict between dev/ops/business.

IT is hard and the pace of change now makes it even more difficult. Join Josh and Laine as they talk about how focusing on solving this pain can help in a lot of surprising ways - kickstarting DevOps, speeding up product delivery, and even enabling the business as a whole.

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.

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.