Recent publications from EUROCONTROL (the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation) provide a concise and accessible way to learn the principles & practices of Systems Thinking for Safety.  This provides a quick way to establish a foundation of fundamental principles and practical advice for organizations adopting Blameless Postmortems as part of their DevOps practices.

Tips, Insights, and Anecdotes about how do deal with moving towards a DevOps culture as an introvert.

Vagrant helps developers minimize the difference between production and development environments. That's great for developers, but why should the rest of the team care?  This talk will discuss several features of Vagrant that will increase consistency and minimize surprises throughout the deployment pipeline.  The discussion will be non-technical, focusing on the value for the entire team.

Delali Dzirasa is Founder and President of Fearless Solutions, a software firm based out of Baltimore, MD. Delali is a Certified Scrum Master and PMP® with a decade of experience leading agile software teams and programs. . Delali Dzirasa graduated with a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) in 2004. Delali always had a passion for entrepreneurship and after working at a handful of technology firms, he founded Fearless in 2009.  Fearless is a company driven by delivering innovative products and services to our customers that make a difference.

Delali strives to make a difference in technology as well as his surrounding community. He serves as a Board Member on the UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Visiting Committee and an active volunteer and member of the Central Maryland Chapter of AFCEA. 

He currently resides with his wife and son in Baltimore City, where he is passionate about increasing the rate of city youth heading into STEM based fields. 

When Delali isn’t busy running Fearless (rarely), he enjoys working out and hanging out with friends and family. He can be reached at [email protected].

DevOps has been a hot topic in the industry for some time now. A lot of people been talking about it. Some have built business models around DevOps-related tools and themes. People have made career around talking about it. In light of all of that, I find it chuckle-worthy that very few people actually know what DevOps is (just follow #devops on Twitter for proof.) I am not going to be one of many trying to create a buzzword-infested definition of DevOps to suit my particular agenda. Instead, I’d like to demystify some of the more common misconception about what DevOps is.

With continuous development, we write less code and consume more re-usable open source code. Innovation is accelerated and so is application complexity.

Complexity is the enemy of quality. Poor quality creates unplanned break-fixes. Break-fixes create a drag on development speed. It’s a continuous loop. What if we could deliver applications on-time (even faster), on-budget (even more efficiently) and with a natural byproduct of less risk?

The good news: other industries have with supply chain management. Applying supply chain approaches to software raises the bar on continuous goals. Get practical tips from the software supply chain playbook to: -Scrutinize the number and quality of your “suppliers” -Manage out avoidable risk and bloat -Improve traceability and visibility -Ensure prompt agile responses when things go wrong

The potential of new legislation with the Cyber Supply Chain Transparency & Remediation Act makes this a particularly important topic for Federal Agencies and the ISVs and SIs who provide software to them. This session will also provide background on this act and provide practical guidance on how respond to and benefit from it.

A quick tour through the tools, techniques and things to look out for in order to deliver a fast web experience. We will cover a broad range of topics including:

The Lean approach champions quick, cheap experiments designed to test hypotheses. It seeks to spend as few resources as possible determining what to build and then, once discovered, to pull back hard and build the thing right.

However, typically in our environment, we scope a project, assume it's the right thing to build, try to build it right, and do whatever's necessary to get it into production, which takes incredible effort. 

During this session, I'll tell the story of how we applied Lean principles to pivot a project away from our traditional many-people/many-months approach and towards a resource-constrained discovery phase. Our output was both working software which the stakeholder team could use to validate their assumptions about project direction, and a much better understanding of several early technical uncertainties that represented risk to the original project.

This session will cover the history of Devops. We will look at some of it’s early influences and influencers. Also included will be some best practice case studies and an overview of some of the most widely used tools.

Welcome to the US Patent and Trademark Office. Our CIO will share some insights on why DevOps is so important to the USPTO.