Tag Archives: yow-2013

Notes from YOW! 2013: Michael T. Nygard on ‘Five Years of DevOps: Where are we Now?’

Posted on by
Reply

I attended Day 1 of YOW! Sydney 2013 and thought some people might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

Small child in a field looking into the distance with binoculars, as someone surveying the current state of DevOps probably wouldn't do.Michael T. Nygard (@mtnygard) is probably best known as the author of the 2007 book ‘Release It!‘, which teaches developers how to look beyond just getting their code working and instead design it from the outset to handle the harsh conditions of production environments. He has since become a DevOps luminary and now works at Cognitect. He spoke at YOW! 2013 about ‘Five Years of DevOps: Where are we Now?’.

Michael started off setting the timeline by pointing out that Chef and Puppet were preceded by CFEngine in about 1993!

He explained how his own experience has contributed to his DevOps insight: he worked as a Dev in Ops for some time, showing the Ops team how to solve some of their problems with Dev-like approaches, but also finding lots of problems with the way Devs created software, which was the chief inspiration for his book. Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2013: Hadi Hariri on ‘Refactoring Legacy Codebases’

Posted on by
Reply

I attended Day 1 of YOW! Sydney 2013 and thought some people might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

A stack of stickers showing the word 'refactor' in a stylised, death-metal-like font.Hadi Hariri is a Developer and Technical Evangelist at JetBrains. He spoke at YOW! about refactoring legacy codebases.

Hadi started by offering reasons for refactoring:

  • increase the understandability of the code
  • decrease the impact of change
  • reduce the cost of change

He described how refactoring relies on culture: Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2013: Jeff Paton on ‘Safety Not Guaranteed: How Successful (Agile) Teams Ignore the Rules to Create Successful Products’

Posted on by
Reply

I attended Day 1 of YOW! Sydney 2013 and thought some people might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

Two people dressed as crash test dummies with their thumbs up. Does following Agile processes to the letter mean your team will be safe and succeed?Jeff Paton (@jeffpaton) is an independent consultant, teacher and Agile coach, and (I believe someone said) the inventor of Story Mapping. He spoke at YOW! about ‘Safety Not Guaranteed: How Successful Teams Ignore the Rules to Create Successful Products’.

Jeff started his talk by announcing that he hated agile development since the moment he first heard of it, but went on to explain that he doesn’t really hate agile now and that an important part of this has been to learn to pay a lot of attention to what he’s doing. Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2013: Jeff Hawkins on ‘Computing Like the Brain: The Path to Machine Intelligence’

Posted on by
1

I attended Day 1 of YOW! Sydney 2013 and thought some people might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

A visual repesentation of machine intelligence as an incandescent brain with digital inputs and outputsKeynote, Day 1: Jeff Hawkins spoke about “Computing Like the Brain: The Path to Machine Intelligence”

Jeff is an entrepreneur (he invented this slightly popular thing called the Palm Pilot) and scientist who co-founded Grok (formerly Numenta) to build technology based on theories of how the neocortex of mammalian brains works. Continue reading →