DevOps, SRE, TechOps, System Administration and the rest have a common goal: stability and reliability. We will discuss how optimizations in SRE, observability, consistency, and training are vital for enhancing speed and operational excellence at scale. We will discuss the history of the competencies of DevOps as well as how we can work toward increasing the pipeline of new entities in the field.
Track: Practices of DevOps & Lean Thinking
Location: Bayview AB
Day of week: Tuesday

Track Host: John Willis
John Willis is the Founder of Botchagalupe Technologies. Before this, John was the Vice President of Devops and Digital Practices at SJ Technologies the Director of Ecosystem Development for Docker, which he joined after the company he co-founded (SocketPlane, which focused on SDN for containers) was acquired by Docker in March 2015. Previous to founding SocketPlane in Fall 2014, John was the Chief DevOps Evangelist at Dell, which he joined following the Enstratius acquisition in May 2013. He has also held past executive roles at Opscode/Chef and Canonical/Ubuntu. John is the author of 7 IBM Redbooks and is co-author of the “Devops Handbook” along with authors Gene Kim and Jez Humble.
10:35am - 11:25am
DevOps & Lean Thinking Panel
What are the latest trends and processes in DevOps & Lean Thinking? This panel will discuss what areas will enhance your team and platform's performance.
Ben Rockwood, VP, Production Engineering @packethost
Damon Edwards, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer @Rundeck
11:50am - 12:40pm
Mapping the Evolution of Socio-Technical Systems
Is it any accident that devops was born at the same time cloud computing and platform as a service were exploding in popularity? Technology, process, and culture necessarily evolve together. Wouldn’t it be great to anticipate these critical shifts and changes, to be sensitized to the coevolution of technology, process, and culture? That would be a huge advantage!
Wardley Maps are increasingly becoming a key practice in a lean thinker’s toolbox. The Wardley Mapping practice can be used to examine trends and options in context rather than falling victim to the tempting allure of buzzwords. That’s right, no more making your blockchain AI totally serverless through the digital transformation of modernized hybrid-clouds. This session will use Wardley Maps to examine the evolution of computing and explore potential futures. Attendees will leave ready and excited to start mapping!
2:55pm - 3:45pm
The System of Profound Knowledge
Dr. Deming, the famous American who taught the Japanese after WWII and empowered them to become a manufacturing power-house in the decades to follow, latter to be brought back to the US as "LEAN", summarized his teachings at the end of his long life in four simple ideas known as the System of Profound Knowledge. This system looks remarkably modern and sets forth a pattern of thinking that we, as a society, are still trying to fully implement. Stop trying to imitate LEAN Practices and instead learn from the underlying ideas themselves to improve the way you learn, lead, and operate.
4:10pm - 5:00pm
Incident Management in the Age of DevOps & SRE
Responding to failure is an organization's most important operations capability. Despite advances in Agile, CI/CD, and DevOps, how most organizations handle incidents hasn't changed all that much in the past 20 years. This talk will take a look at the techniques that high-performing operations organizations are using to finally transform how they identify, mobilize, and respond to incidents.
5:25pm - 6:15pm
Security and Compliance Theater - The Seventh Deadly Disease
Listen to author and evangelist John Willis describe the “Seven Deadly Diseases of Devops” with a focus on the most costly of them all - Security and Compliance Theater. This presentation will drill in on the practices needed to create long-term systemic “safe” improvement. Understanding these key patterns enables an organization to focus mainly on the intersection of human capital and technology. Although prescriptive practices like Lean, Agile, SAFE and even DevOps may be necessary for IT acceleration they are in most cases not sufficient for long-term systemic improvement. In other words, you can’t Lean, Agile, SAFe or DevOps your way around institutionalized organizational habits. The following is a list of the “Seven Deadly Diseases”:
- Invisible Work
- Management System Toil
- Tribal Knowledge
- Misalignment of Incentives
- Incongruent Organizational Design
- Misunderstanding Complexity
- Security and Compliance Theater
These seven diseases of organizational behavior must be discovered with “absence of prescriptive practice” through a process of organizational fact-finding, something described as organizational forensics. In this presentation, we will look at the “Seven Deadly Diseases” of IT organization and show how all seven are indistinguishably related to cybersecurity, risk, and compliance.
Last Year's Tracks
Monday, 16 November
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Remotely Productive: Remote Teams & Software
More and more companies are moving to remote work. How do you build, work on, and lead teams remotely?
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Operating Microservices
Building and operating distributed systems is hard, and microservices are no different. Learn strategies for not just building a service but operating them at scale.
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Distributed Systems for Developers
Computer science in practice. An applied track that fuses together the human side of computer science with the technical choices that are made along the way
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The Future of APIs
Web-based API continue to evolve. The track provides the what, how, and why of future APIs, including GraphQL, Backend for Frontend, gRPC, & ReST
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Resurgence of Functional Programming
What was once a paradigm shift in how we thought of programming languages is now main stream in nearly all modern languages. Hear how software shops are infusing concepts like pure functions and immutablity into their architectures and design choices.
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Social Responsibility: Implications of Building Modern Software
Software has an ever increasing impact on individuals and society. Understanding these implications helps build software that works for all users
Tuesday, 17 November
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Non-Technical Skills for Technical Folks
To be an effective engineer, requires more than great coding skills. Learn the subtle arts of the tech lead, including empathy, communication, and organization.
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Clientside: From WASM to Browser Applications
Dive into some of the technologies that can be leveraged to ultimately deliver a more impactful interaction between the user and client.
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Languages of Infra
More than just Infrastructure as a Service, today we have libraries, languages, and platforms that help us define our infra. Languages of Infra explore languages and libraries being used today to build modern cloud native architectures.
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Mechanical Sympathy: The Software/Hardware Divide
Understanding the Hardware Makes You a Better Developer
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Paths to Production: Deployment Pipelines as a Competitive Advantage
Deployment pipelines allow us to push to production at ever increasing volume. Paths to production looks at how some of software's most well known shops continuous deliver code.
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Java, The Platform
Mobile, Micro, Modular: The platform continues to evolve and change. Discover how the platform continues to drive us forward.
Wednesday, 18 November
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Security for Engineers
How to build secure, yet usable, systems from the engineer's perspective.
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Modern Data Engineering
The innovations necessary to build towards a fully automated decentralized data warehouse.
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Machine Learning for the Software Engineer
AI and machine learning are more approachable than ever. Discover how ML, deep learning, and other modern approaches are being used in practice by Software Engineers.
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Inclusion & Diversity in Tech
The road map to an inclusive and diverse tech organization. *Diversity & Inclusion defined as the inclusion of all individuals in an within tech, regardless of gender, religion, ethnicity, race, age, sexual orientation, and physical or mental fitness.
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Architectures You've Always Wondered About
How do they do it? In QCon's marquee Architectures track, we learn what it takes to operate at large scale from well-known names in our industry. You will take away hard-earned architectural lessons on scalability, reliability, throughput, and performance.
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Architecting for Confidence: Building Resilient Systems
Your system will fail. Build systems with the confidence to know when they do and you won’t.