Show notes
Bridget records on day 2 of devopsdays Cape Town 2019 with two organizers and two speakers. Cobus Bernard is a technical evangelist at AWS, and Adrian, who does DevOps-type work at Salesloft, co-organizes with Cobus. This is the fourth year of the event, which came together after Bridget visited in March 2016 and held its first event that November. Daniel, who works at Datadog, was the opening keynote speaker at that first event and is back to speak this year. Devi Moodley heads up the DevOps team at Nedbank, one of South Africa's four biggest banks.
Transforming a Bank Founded in 1888
Devi's talk went straight to the practicalities of transformation at a giant organization. Devi says "we were not a Spotify": Nedbank is a traditional bank established in 1888, with traditional values and local and international regulation, which makes bringing in "a sense of looseness" very difficult. The approach was to embrace those traditional concepts, accept who they were, and start from there. A bank has to demonstrate value before anyone adopts anything, so they went in with evangelists who had credibility and used them as poster boys for the message. Devi says it's about generating financial value, doing things cheaper and better, and that as long as they generated value they could get more investment. That is how they're growing "slowly but surely, one pipeline at a time."
Adrian says it's easy to find good stories from unicorn companies, so the program needed balance, and if a big enterprise known for moving slowly can adopt DevOps, "it's possible anywhere." Devi's bank is a sponsor and has spoken at the event for the past few years, and Adrian notes many South African banks have adopted DevOps. Bridget says Minneapolis likewise has people from large local retailers, since it isn't only for the tech vendors.
What MMA Taught Me About Working in Tech
Daniel's talk title was What MMA Taught Me About Working in Tech. Computers and mixed martial arts have both been big parts of Daniel's life, and Daniel realized that a lot of how they act, make decisions and interact with people came from martial arts training. Cobus says balancing technical and cultural talks is always fun, because "tech is never the problem. It's always people," and the organizers were surprised how much culture showed up even in talks they expected to be technical. Bridget says that's also true of open source: adoption depends on the people deciding whether to trust a project, and a technically excellent tool with no documentation and six months of silent pull requests looks risky.
Adrian agrees that if a project's pull requests sit for months and the last commit was six months ago, "if there's no community around it, it's not going to happen." Daniel pushes back that vitality is worth checking but doesn't settle it, since some software Daniel uses hasn't been updated for 10 years because it still does what it was designed to do, unless there's a security problem. Daniel adds that tooling is getting better at flagging that, and suggests building checks into pipelines or occasionally looking at the CVE list.
How a Bank Picks Its Tools
Bridget asks how Nedbank decides whether an open source tool is okay. Devi says open source is allowed in principle, subject to tight security checks. The method starts with the community that will use the tool: unpack their problems, map the whole value stream, have the team prioritize the biggest issues, then look for tools that would solve them. A proof of concept runs for open source and paid tools alike, and the outcomes are evaluated against the original problems. Where timing matters they "literally stopwatch our developers" before and after a learning cycle, rate the tools on a Harvey Ball scale of 1 to 4, and sometimes test two tools in parallel with different teams.
An easy tool takes about two weeks, starting at the beginning of a team sprint after a few days of training, and a heavier one about six weeks. Sign-off takes longer than the proof of concept "because we're a bank." Devi says a full process map can be done by locking people in a room for four hours. Bridget likes that it happens inside the sprint, since for the period of the decision it has to be the work, and Devi says that makes it practical and not "a science experiment scenario." Daniel says the depth of the answer was impressive and unexpected.
Cape Town, Joburg and Who Runs the Conference
Bridget asks about the link with the Johannesburg community. Adrian's involvement has been mostly Cape Town, and jokes that Capetonians give Johannesburg a hard time because "They don't have the ocean." Adrian says a growing DevOps community exists in Johannesburg and the Cape Town team should help them start a devopsdays without running it. Adrian mentions the Python community, where PyConZA needs meetups in both cities to qualify under the Python Software Foundation.
Daniel says devopsdays events are meant to be local, and that in 2013 when the first Paris event ran, people traveled from all over Europe because it was the only game in town, but that was never the goal. Daniel says roughly 75 events were planned for 2019 with no central committee authorizing them, and that if a team in Marseille wanted to run one, Daniel would share the mistakes made and then back away. Bridget relays how Matty Stratton used Minneapolis, which ran a few weeks ahead of Chicago, as a model to copy what worked and skip what didn't. Adrian adds that cross-pollination across organizations means Johannesburg could eventually help Cape Town improve too.
Running a Conference Out of GitLab
Cobus asks Adrian to walk through the process used to run the conference. Adrian says nothing is public, and the idea was to use DevOps to run a DevOps conference, after taking a management job and starting to care about project management. There are private GitLab repositories, one for the meetup and one for the conference, each with a wiki as a knowledge base (venues, sponsors, potential speakers) and issues for actionable items. The meetup gets one issue per month from a template checklist, covering the venue, time slot, meetup.com page, sponsors and announcements on Twitter.
For the conference they use a milestone per year and an issue per sponsor, labeled as a lead until they sign, with templates for each sponsor level because, for instance, a platinum sponsor gets to choose the Wi-Fi password. The same idea covers speakers: whether their bio picture, abstract and Twitter account are in place. Adrian says it's still a work in progress, and the stated goal is to automate it so a script can run next year's event. Bridget plans to deputize Adrian to help rewrite parts of the organizer guide.
Takeaways
Daniel's is a talk by Rory, who works at Microsoft, on building things usable by people regardless of their abilities, an area Daniel says they don't know much about but have some personal experience with. Adrian heard the talk earlier in the year at DevConf and says it made the point that building accessible websites is easy and "it's no longer an excuse to have a website that's inaccessible." Devi's takeaway is from Daniel's talk: "the success of any organization is based on the well-being of your people," and work-life balance "isn't just a couple of words on a piece of paper."
Adrian has a list of 10 things devopsdays could do better, and most aren't about Cape Town, so Adrian may aim at improving the global DevOps community. Bridget, who says they're the current titular lead of the global devopsdays community, would like to subscribe to that newsletter. Cobus noticed new people asking questions in the open spaces and more experienced people helping, and says the community should invest in making it easier to ask, since many people take remote jobs and disappear from the community scene. Bridget closes by praising the way the organizers pre-selected open space ideas, gave participants a web interface to add to them and sorted them ahead of time, a format Bridget hadn't seen before that got discussions going right away.
Bridget chats with Devi Moodley, Daniel Maher, Adrian Moisey, and Cobus Bernard at devopsdays Cape Town 2019.
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