Agenda 2020

Welcome to Deserted Island DevOps! We’ll kick off with some words from the organizers then get into the sessions!

Devops and security have a lot to learn from each other, but there are gaps in communication and understanding between the two. How did these flaws come to be, and how can we work to remediate them? This talk contains ideas, a call to action, and some terrible puns. Let’s figure this out together, so we can build bridges between our islands, catch more bugs, and craft things better.

“Don’t chop down trees.” “Do leave a hand-written notes.”

The very rules of visiting another player’s island in Animal Crossing also happen to be great rules for building serverless.

While serverless is easy to build, it’s also easy to step on each other’s toes, create unexpected dependencies, and alter configuration that breaks other services. This talk gives some guidelines on how to operate harmoniously, store configuration as code, and monitor performance to find problems early.

Or, how the real-time nature of Animal Crossing informs DevOps practices.

The current DevOps ecosystem is moving incredibly fast, and I’ve found that because of that it often pays to…slow down. You can start building off that cool new tool now, or wait until there’s a one-command CLI to deploy the whole thing for you.

Of course, sometimes you need feature X right now and can’t wait, in which case, get going!

I’ve learned this lesson over and over in the last three years of working in the Cloud Native ecosystem and would like to share my experience of when it’s been worth being an early adopter, and when, like planting those non-native fruits instead of immediately selling them for those sweet, sweet bells, it’s worth waiting.

At its core, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a game about building a community — literally — on a remote island. Right now, many of us are also experiencing our own version of remote living, though luckily with many of life’s modern conveniences. Without in-person events, meetups, and interactions, it’s crucial to create or maintain digital spaces for developer communities.

This talk will explore converting a face-to-face community to a virtual community, a few tools (like Twitch) you can use, and how to be a good citizen of these communities. You’ll leave with a few examples to hopefully inspire you and an answer to the all-important question — how is community building like Animal Crossing?

“Mob Programming” is a software development approach that goes beyond pairing to engaging your whole team and solving a problem together. See how this method is being used to teach cloud migration to dev teams that have rarely touched ops before - while migrating real-world enterprise apps in the process. With the sudden pivot to working from home, learn the best practices that were discovered to keep your now-distributed island villagers (coworkers and trainees) up to speed on new technology and concepts, whether WFH or not!

It’s every developer’s worst fear…breaking the build! Or worse, bringing down prod!

Much like getting that first wasp sting (especially as a new Animal Crossing player), our first instinct when encountering failure is to run away from it and potentially change our behavior to avoid repeating our mistake!

In this talk, however, I’d like to talk about why that failure is important and how, if given the right environment, it can be the most valuable learning opportunity for all people involved!

Specifically, I’ll discuss:

• How certain things can only be learned after a failure (like the fact that you can make your own medicine with the wasp nest!)

• How others can help us when we discover a failure point (much like villagers helping us out with some free medicine!)

• How fostering a psychologically safe environment to fail positively impacts a team (much like discovering the “worst” penalty for being stung twice in a row is a swollen eye and a trip back to your home!)

By the end of this talk, I hope that you’ll leave with a new outlook on failure and begin embracing the possible learning opportunities that await your team!

Like a lot of engineers, I like to tinker. I also like hardware hacking, video games, and over-engineering the hell out of something. When my team at work decided to build a proof of concept demonstrating the possibility of fast over-the-air updates for edge devices, we settled on using a car as the example of an edge device. It’s flashy, you know? This also presented me with an opportunity to do all of the things I love, and call it work: build a self-driving RC car, and then let people race it around a track using a repurposed USB racewheel and whole lotta Python. Here’s how I did it, and how you, too, can build something fun to harass your pets and co-workers with!

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

When your application is mission critical, DevOps can feel a lot like fixing a spaceship to go to space. It can be hard to get all the right pieces in the right places at the right time, & sometimes all you can do is take a step back and have a little fun with what you’ve learned. That’s how a software engineer & a devops practitioner who have neither been to space nor built a video game before found themselves swapping roles as well as building a game about making it to space to bring people together during a time of unprecedented virtualization.

We’ll share our progress & mistakes made as well as some of the highs & lows of our game development foray (featuring challenging moments such as “why is it green in my terminal and pink in yours??” & “what are tilesets and why are they so hard?!”)

Topics you can expect to hear in this talk:

• XKCD’s “You Will Not Go to Space Today” as a metaphor for devops
• Prototyping jump start vs learn-as-you-go development
• Raft in a Game for dynamic room generation and scaling
• DevOps concepts applied to (amateur) game design
• Some things we used: Godotengine & GDScript, Go & termbox, Jenkins-X, AWS, Nomad, Consul, Vault, Terraform

Everything is a little bit broken all of the time. Sometimes, like recently, as in right now, the core truths and assumptions about the universe seem to be shifted out from underneath us without warning. And yet, Netflix streams movies, GitHub serves code, we all keep going and working from home and surviving. These systems, both technical and social, are resilient. And through their resilience they are able to handle all those one-in-a-million occurrences that crop up nine-times-in-ten. But what does it mean to be resilient? And further, how can we recognize and grow this resilience to better deal with the systemic surprises we’re dealing with right now and in the future? What does a resilient team look like, and how do you foster that?

This talk will answer:

• What is Resilience?
• How can we create resilience in ourselves, teams and systems?
• How do our networks of systems (people, teams, organizations, applications) create resilience for each other?
• What happens when major systems and networks fail?
• How can we discover and foster resilience in our people, teams and systems?

Communities and relationships affect how we work, why we work and what we work on, so it’s natural to feel unproductive or unmotivated at a time when they are at risk. Lets talk about productivity while working under quarantine, the risks and symptoms of burnout, and how we take care of ourselves in a uniquely difficult time. I’ll share some of my own strategies and open up discussion for others to share theirs as well. We’re all in this together!

A final message from the organizers to wrap up the event!