From The Major BBS to Mingle, my road to Continuous Deployment

Abstract

I have about 20 years of experience that has led me to want to move my career towards DevOps. I plan to make this pretty personal, funny, lighthearted and use my resume to drive the talk. At the end of the day, I plan to keep it pretty humble and more of statement of respect for the where the movement has come and how I see the thought leadership behind DevOps driving change.

I have the following outline so far. I like the Ignite Talk format since I haven’t given a presentation of this nature for about 15 years and need a bit of a format to force me to edit/structure. I also think I can probably come up with 20 original / entertaining slides.

• My early days as a Sys Admin
  • My very first job as a Sys Admin for an ISP in St. Charles called “Microthought”
    • I will probably have a couple fun nostalgic slides
      • Early FreeBSD and Modem Pools
      • Windows NT 3.51
  • I’m going to talk about my second Job where I worked with a bunch of really serious “Software Engineers” and how they were Sciencey and I was Musicy and when I found Web Development -- it wasn’t what they did and I liked it…
    • Basically, I could do development without being much of a Scientist..
• My move from being a Sys Admin to being a Web Developer
  • I never stopped doing Sys Admin work
  • I thought developers who couldn’t do Sys Admin work were lame
  • Don’t even get me started on the ones that couldn’t write SQL
  • More fun nostalgic AIS slides
• Application Support
  • How I was tricked into it
  • Why I’m glad I was
  • Why I think it’s precisely the “Dev” part of DevOps
  • For me, I’m going to talk a bit about how I felt some Silos broke down while I did my job at Apartments.
  • I’m also going to point out that some remained to rather inefficient ends.
• Management
  • What I like about management
  • What I don’t like about management
  • What parts of management I want to continue doing
  • I intend to try to make this funny
• 2014
  • Why are we still making configuration changes without Code ?
  • Why are deployments still hard ?
  • Why are developers still doing too much support ?
  • A few relavent RN things