Tools, Culture, and Aesthetics: The Art of DevOps

As we pass the six year anniversary of the naming of that Thing™ we now know as DevOps, a curious puzzle remains in the forefront of practitioners' minds: organizations from ten-person startups to multinational enterprises continue to wrestle with what DevOps means, what it looks like, what behaviors it entails, and fundamentally, how to consistently implement it successfully.

For every case study of the storied "unicorn companies," there exist numerous counterexamples of teams in the trenches, struggling to fit the elusive pieces of "tools and culture" together in a coherent way.

In this talk, we will examine why these now school-aged ideals remain so difficult to implement, explore why DevOps is often described as "the movement that refuses to identify itself," and what your team can do to confront the dichotomies they are likely to face as they transform how they, their colleagues, and their company go about their daily work.

About the speaker - J. Paul Reed

J. Paul Reed, aka The Sober Build Engineer, has over a decade of experience in the trenches as a build/release and tools engineer, working with such organizations as VMware, Mozilla, Postbox, and Symantec.

In 2012, he founded Release Engineering Approaches, a consultancy incorporating a host of tools and techniques to help organizations "Simply Ship. Every time." He's worked across a number of industries, from financial services to software-as-a-service to consumer products, with teams from 2 to 200 on everything from tooling, operational analysis and improvement, team culture transformation, and business value optimization.

Paul is also a visiting scientist and Chief Delivery Officer at Praxis Flow and the founding host of The Ship Show, a twice-monthly podcast tackling topics related to build engineering, DevOps, and release management.