Last year, my esteemed colleague JP Schneider and I were invited to keynote at a couple of conferences last year. We gave two variations on the same talk, entitled “Genesis: Terraforming a New Home for Firefox Crash Reporter”, at each of Hashiconf 2015 and Velocity EU 2015 respectively.
The blurb for these talks is as follows:
Everyone loves talking about different stacks used in migrating applications to DevOps methodologies, but the most important and valuable change is not a technology stack; instead, it is the human stack.
In this keynote address, we will cover the intersection of technology and humans, and walk the audience through a real life example of the move of Firefox crash reporter. The three engineers tasked with this had to build the plane while it was in the air, all without landing or crashing.
As with many projects, hard deadlines and requirements made the team work through a lot of tough decisions and compromises while simultaneously training devs, product managers, managers, and other engineers in the new world of DevOps and Continuous Delivery.
The talks were a lot of fun and were well received by both audiences. We keep things light (including images and quotes from Shakespeare to Mobb Deep) and we keep them honest (both our successes and failures).
The Velocity talk, which at 25 minutes in length is the shorter of the two, is aimed at a more general audience; the Hashiconf talk is longer, and includes a lot more detail about the Hashicorp tools that we used to reach our goals. I hope you enjoy either or both of them. 🙂
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