I had a fabulous time at Config Management Camp this year, so I decided to write a brief post about what I learnt. Spoiler alert — it’s all about people!

Community

I am from a very large family, and when we all get together it’s noisy, rowdy, drunken and wonderful. It doesn’t happen very often so when it does it’s very special. Config Management Camp feels exactly the same.

Competition is put to one side — whether you’re a user or a vendor everyone comes to learn from each other — to participate, to hang out and to reconnect. It was wonderful to see the warm welcome extended to John Vincent (key note speaker and clearly a much adored member of the community) who had travelled to Europe for the first time in 4 years to be at the event. …

I should have posted these at the time, but 2016 got the better of me and my blog has been rather neglected. Below is an update on some of the talks I have given recently.

My next talk will be at Config Management Camp in Gent — Resilient Systems Require Resilient People.

DevOpsDays Berlin — October 2016

Information Overload and the Real Cost of Interruptions

In this talk I explore how our relationship with technology can change our thought patterns and behaviours, encouraging us to multi-task and preventing us from focusing on the tasks that are most important.

There is no recording of this talk but hopefully I will be able to link to one soon! …

This post was published on December 28th 2016. I’m now working at Server Density as their Product Manager and I’M LOVING IT! This post was read over 1000 times during my job search so I will leave it here as inspiration for others. If you’re scared of asking the internet for help don’t be — with just 3 tweets and this blog post I received some unbelievable offers and met some fantastic people along the way too.

Today I tweeted that I’m looking for a new role, but 140 characters is nowhere near enough to describe who I am or what I’m looking for next in my career, so here is the long version. …

We talk about culture and collaboration a lot in the DevOps community. Culture is a cornerstone of a successful DevOps transformation, and the right culture is a critical to creating a productive environment for engineers. It’s easy to focus on collaboration and sharing in a world where we’re trying to bring teams together, but recently I’ve been more worried about the other “C Word” — Concentration.

Recently I have taken an interest in the concept of Digital Mindfulness as a way of improving some of the behaviours I have developed with the use of technology. By being more mindful I hope to break some of the bad habits I’ve picked up and ultimately try to improve my concentration and productivity. …

This week I attended the first WinOps conference in London, a conference dedicated to the people, tools and practices it takes to “do DevOps” on Windows. The day was well organised, well executed and well attended which was impressive as a new event. Below I share some of my thoughts about the conference and the future of the #WinOps community.

A different DevOps community…

This was not a conference attended by start-up hipster techies, it was a conference for battle scarred enterprise IT folk. A conference for those wrestling with DevOps in a world of legacy systems and enterprise licensing agreements. …

When I think about the effects that stress and anxiety can have on your health, I am surprised I got out of Release Management alive.

Recently I’ve been reflecting on how practices like Continuous Delivery are changing roles within IT and whilst I love to chat about the business benefits this can bring, I’m also interested in the human benefits. The relentless stress and disappointment of managing big-bang, quarterly releases is now a thing of the past, and we have automation to thank for that.

So, to Release Managers everywhere I say: DevOps is not here to make you redundant, it’s here to SAVE YOUR LIFE. …