Chris Barker


Title: Everything is Terrible: Three Perspectives on Building, Configuring, and Securing Software

Description:

Developers, operations, and security all have differing agendas and benchmarks for success. One is tasked with building new features, the next with delivering and making them available, and the third is tasked with mitigating the risks associated with the previous two.

Core to the DevOps movement is the idea of building empathy with people in other teams in order to align for business success. Expanding this idea to Dev, Ops, and Security, three engineers who have each lived primarily one of these will be providing their perspective in working collaboratively to try not to kill each other. They will talk about their backgrounds, provide practical examples from daily experiences, and share suggestions on building common tooling that minimizes friction and enhances collaboration.

This talk will discuss

  • The misalignment of priorities that organisations often force upon these groups
  • Struggles with collaboration and working cultures
  • Common bottlenecks associated with release cycles and security processes
  • Building empathy and optimizing for communication that doesn’t involve fisticuffs (or other 19th century combat styles)

The audience will come away with:

  • Ideas for handling these complicated situations
  • Approaches for building workflows and possible tooling suggestions to minimize the tire fires
  • A new appreciation for those on the other sides of the silo walls

Speaker

Chris Barker

Chris Barker

@mrzarquon

Turning in his pager for an airline miles membership, Chris Barker now helps fellow system administrators refine and automate their infrastructure. In his past life as a systems administrator, he has administered Linux, Windows, and OS X systems in infrastructure ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. He was drawn to Puppet due to his automation-driven creativity. When not traveling for Puppet, he resides in Portland, OR automating parts of his house and deconstructing cocktails.