Clinton Wolfe


Title: Maintaining Config Management Code: Why is Everything Awful?

Description:

We just made all of our infrastructure into code, hooray! Wait….more code? But code goes bad, and is hard to write in a way we can maintain! Whether your team uses Puppet, Chef, Ansible, or something else in the Configuration Management space, you may have noticed that your code has a very short shelf-life before it starts causing harm by being out of date.

As a veteran from a hard to maintain language (Perl) I'll share the practices that affect maintainability, and insights into coding in the Operations domain. I learned a lot about the pressures on a codebase that make it harder or easier to maintain. As I moved into DevOps and configuration Management, a lot of those lessons came with me; but I saw the pressures greatly amplified, and the software engineering tools much weaker. I'll share tips on what to avoid entirely, what practices to invest in, and when to burn it all down and start over.

Title: DevOps Jargon: Your goat antifragiled my snowflake!

Description:

Are you a cow, a goat, a canary, or a unicorn? Are running K8S? Who the heck is Brent? Find out!

Welcome to DevOps, where we are all about breaking down walls. But, we've created a private dialect, full of familiar words with unfamiliar meanings, and in-jokes upon in-jokes. Many newcomers wish there was a glossary for the movement. Time to be inclusive!

In this fun session, we'll go over some of the more unintuitive terms (being a goat is a good thing!) and the backstories behind them.

Speaker

Clinton Wolfe

Clinton Wolfe


Clinton Wolfe leads the DevOps Practice at OmniTI, which means he voluntarily chooses to go into heavily siloed, dysfunctional organizations and try to get them to talk to each other with as few stabbings as possible. He’s especially interested in testable infrastructure, and the processes needed to support quality throughout the application lifecycle. He is also Oliver and Sylvia’s Daddy.