DevOps World for Practitioners – Darin Pope, CloudBees

This is texturung TV. The great pleasure being joined by Darren Pope. Darren is developer Advocate with cloudbees.

Welcome Darren. Hey, thanks Mitch. How you doing today?

Awesome. Awesome. Are you in Miami?

Right? I mean that feels like Miami, it's Fort Lauderdale. So you're pretty close.

It's close enough. Just yeah, it's right just right up just right up the beach there Fort Lauderdale is a much better airport than Miami. We'll leave that there.

I agree with that. I prefer not to if I don't have to but you've traveled enough, you know, those those Secrets. Yeah, and we probably shouldn't be talking about airports today.

What should we talk? Well, we should be talking about the Orlando Airport because that's where devops world is coming up on the 27th 28th. And you and our chatty.

That's what our topic is. I'd love to get your perspective on devops before we do that. Tell us a little bit about what your role as of as devil or Advocate at cloudbees.

So my role at cloudbees as a developer Advocate is I'm basically a YouTuber don't tell anybody because that's where I spend a lot of my time in this paid to do that and I get paid to do it. That's that's a wonderful thing and I create a lot of content around Jenkins and Cloud BCI because those have been our Cloud BCI has been our Flagship product for a number of years. And of course, it's based on Jenkins.

And so I I focus a lot of time there and if you go back through any time, it's like I've done a lot. Let's just put that way if you go and look at our our YouTube channel, you're gonna see my face a lot and you're gonna see this background a lot. But I really enjoy it because with Jenkins and with Cloud VCI, we get to talk about lots of items that people just maybe don't think about or maybe they're thinking about well do I really want to go to Jenkins to or want to look at cloudy CIA?

That's you know, hopefully some of those videos will help answer those questions for you. Well talk about Jenkins kind of takes me back home. That was the first devops tool that I use starting.

A journey way back and you know 2012-13 something like that. So yeah, it's a great place to start for sure and with Cloud bees. Well, let's talk about devops world.

It's obviously not your first rodeo. You've been to these kind of conferences before and I'm sure you have a pretty good appreciation for it people who are coming in lots of different people, but the folks that are doing the real work that people that are practitioners doing this day today like like you are as a well-brandvocate working with Jenkins and Cloud VCI. What is it that you know that folks coming to the conference can get from that kind of an experience?

Well, a lot of times it isn't just about going to the session even though I want to talk about a couple of sessions today a lot of it just like any conference is going to be the hallway track. Well, what's the hallway track? If you don't know what it is, it's basically when you can't find anything on the session you want to go to or maybe you've been in enough sessions and you feel like your brain is mush.

Then going to the hallway track, which basically means who's hanging out in the hallways while sessions are going on and people or people finding coffee. Those are probably one of the most exciting parts of the conference is because you're gonna meet people that you've never met before. Obviously you just strike up a conversation now.

You probably can't tell it but I'm an extreme introvert. But when I do one-on-one, like what we're doing right now, man, that's that's where I get the most out of it and sometimes sorry some of the speakers. I enjoyed a little bit more than going to your session.

I'll say I'll bet you're not the only introvert attending matter of fact, I'm well. So what would be your suggestion is if you're walking down the hallway, there's people kind of going I'm going by or people standing around water the coffee machine, whatever. What's a great introduction to kind of Icebreaker to start that conversation?

Hey who's going to Disney World today? In this case, but one of the more serious ones is like hey, what do you do at where you work? Right?

Because you try to spy out the badge like okay, who are they are they a vendor run away quickly. Don't don't talk to the vendors. I'm a vendor so you can talk to me.

But if you see something like a Fidelity or an Amadeus and it's like wait, I saw people from this crew had sessions. It's like, okay. What is it?

I couldn't make the session or I'm not gonna be able to make the session because I'm going somewhere else. What is it that you do? Right.

It's like here's what I do. It's like is it do we have any overlap or not? Yeah, and and the other thing I talked about themselves, right?

What do you do exactly about you? Yeah. Yeah, because and maybe one of the first things I try to get to sorry managers.

It's like do you actually do the work or you a manager people doing the work? Because if you're a manager, oh, you know, I might this month you but I'm gonna move on pretty quick. Because I want to talk to the people that are in the trenches dealing with the day-to-day problems.

Yeah, people like me people that are doing the work. Yeah, they're in that role. Exactly.

Well great. And I do appreciate you know, we as technical folks. We like to avoid this sales people and all of that kind of stuff there is a way you can go talk to the vendor booths and you know sort of find what you're looking for or maybe listening to conversation.

So there are some good things you can do that too. But I totally get what you're saying go find people like yourself, right your people. Yes, you can learn from or connect with similar experiences, maybe experiences.

You don't have that's probably just as bad. Well, maybe more. Yep and plus then you've got potentially a buddy to hang out with the conference with you know, two or three people.

I've done that at conferences over the decades and it's just so we're like it makes you just like hey, do you want to meet up because like a lot of times. In fact this case my wife is traveling with me on this on this leg of leg of the show. Yeah.

I'm only doing one so it doesn't matter. There's only one show So I'll be able to hang out with her. But honestly, she's leaving town to go visit friends.

So I probably be searching around for people that are not part of my group and let me you know, encourage people is like if you're coming with three or four people from your company. Okay, maybe hang on a little bit, but try to find some other people hang out with. Yeah, it feels weird amongst yourselves.

That's so you already see those people right from a new folks. Yeah. Well, let's talk about some of the content at this year's devops World, by the way, it's on 27th through the 29th in Orlando, correct?

So, you know tell us what are you looking forward to or what would you recommend to folks coming to the conference to share your screen? Go right ahead. Oh, you got it.

You have sure I'm plan but here let me go and share my screen and just in case people have not taken a look at the site. com. And then of course the URL goes completely wonky from there just because you know, whatever.

What you'll do is I have to slide because Zoom I'm good to agenda. And then once we bring up the agenda. There's tracks.

So if you click on tracks now, you'll notice there's a Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday. So Monday and Tuesday are paid workshops. Let's skip over those right now.

I'm gonna go to Wednesday and I'm gonna click on tracks and just select practitioner. There's five total tracks. So if your boss is with you, Have him go to somewhere or have him or her go to a different track than you that's so but we're gonna focus on practitioner.

So this top one that comes up actually not the top one but it falls into it both of these two here. supply chain good grief supply chain is everywhere all the time. And there are a handful of sessions this top one from Adam at AWS security is a good one.

That one's on Wednesday. There's also a one on Thursday when we look at the list that's called tackling supply chain security by monitorizing Jenkins and that is done by the people from Fidelity Investments. So one is a vendor one is people actually doing the work.

I'm considering AWS of vendor in this case. If your company is not looking at supply chain. Using will be that's that plain and simple.

So supply chain to me is one of the cool things and and really tablespoons on that too. Right remember looking they're like 20 sessions on supply chain on this to practical. Yeah, you know using Jenkins.

Yep, another one that I want to call out. Let's see when we do this. Oh, there's this one from Amadeus.

And again, I said Amadeus earlier, but if we take a look at where was it here, what was the name of it was called the dev the Ops and get There it is how fast can they recover a disaster now? If you don't know who Amadeus is? Amadeus is a travel platform.

You may have heard of Galileo or other ones saber. It's in that same space. Very large one.

Very large one. So. You know, all we want to do is accelerate everything via automation.

Right. We want our coffee brought to us faster if you're still in office, and we throw everything at it we can this is what triggered it for me devops get Ops secops. Whatever Ops quick quick Ops you name it, right?

So again, this is another one that is from a person in the trench. So this is one that sort of caught my eye going through. I have to give a hat tip to Jenkins.

There's one called contributing to open source Workshop. I have to right just because It's we just have to where was it. It was in the morning on Wednesday.

Sorry, this is taking so long. I should have ordered these but I can't order them. So you're looking at the real site.

So I am looking and this is what people will see too. Right once you filter it. This is what you're going to see there.

It is contributing to open source Workshop. So we have Mark weight Bruno. I'm not gonna try Bruno's last name.

I've never tried it before I'm gonna try it here for the first time and Jean Martin Mason if who's also known as Santa? If you ever see a picture of Jean Mark, you'll understand what I mean. So this is a 90 minute workshop on teaching people how they can contribute to open source.

And Mark and I did a series of videos. I'd probably a couple months ago. We're talking about modernizing Jenkins plugins and this is similar around that so a lot of the content that was from that series is gone that has has been put into this session.

So if you're considering contributing to open source, this will be a good way to look at it if you've never done it before I have one more for this Wednesday and then we're gonna go to Thursday. You were there being intimidating. I bet these folks remove those kind of barriers.

Like everybody has a first time contributing to a project right? Let's just absolutely absolutely. Okay.

Here's one. This is the last one on Wednesday. I want to call out devops for D apps.

Do you know what D apps are or dabs anymore? Yeah. Okay, so it's decentralized applications.

smart contracts blockchain I've done some just off the side playing with solidity and doing some development that way. And I was like how in the heck would I even can you know roll in devops as just somebody starting to play with it? This session is going to give me some of those answers because why not right smart contracts, if you look at ignoring all the you know, the financial woes of some of the blockchain stuff going on.

The true thing of smart contracts is really key to all this right? What what is a smart contract? Right?

Can I prove that this this asset was signed? Maybe it was truly a contract right and following watching as a blockchain. Yeah.

Again, this is not one that would use for day job type stuff, but this is interesting from a hmm. I wonder what this is going to be like over and understand it. What's going on?

Yeah. That's right, because you can explore topics that you're like I'd like to know more about even if I don't know. I'm going to use it exactly informed right because you might get one little piece of information out of that that helps with.

Your day job part of things, right? It may not apply directly but it's like oh wait, I could take that massage it and then bring it back and it's like, oh now I can do this, you know a bit money you go back to your day job within a few months some manager somewhere in the meetings gonna bring up blockchain not know what they're talking about and you can say well I do know a little bit about it and you can start to get started on the right foot, right? Yeah for sure.

So I want to take a look at a couple on Thursday if that's okay, you bet. Okay, so for Thursday. There is a session a roadmap for effectively scaling feature Flag Management.

Oh feature Flags a big topic great each flags big topic Cloud beasts in full disclosure Club East does have a feature flag protocol Beast feature management. And Steve is one of the engineers that works on that. And also Todd Barrett from dynatrace is gonna be there now.

Okay, you're thinking okay why Cloud bees and dinotrace? Well, the other thing we have done if you click on the session it expands. Oh, and there's something else I need to call too.

There is an open feature initiative that has now been launched through. I believe the cncf. It's Mike.

Correct me if I'm wrong. Oh wait. Nobody's here to correct me this time and Corrections coming up here.

Okay good, so, I believe it's open feature. And or excuse me cncf. So seeing how this now standard is being brought out to the world.

So this is going to be very interesting to watch if you're into feature flags at all. If you're considering moving two feature flags for your business applications or any other use case for it. This will be one to go watch.

I do want to call it. One thing. I think it was.

No, it wasn't this one. Let me go back to Wednesday for just a second. because I'm not gonna click all day long.

Oh, there it is. Notice, sometimes you'll see this ISC CPE submitter. So what that means is this session is CPE eligible.

So continuing Continuing I can't remember the P education professional. Yeah professional education. So if you're needing some checkboxes.

to make You know to justify you going to the trip. You can get some CPS out of these and when I get credit for it, you know, yeah, I'm gonna be there exactly if you don't have to justify it. It's a great thing.

You have to have so many CPU credits per year to maintain your your whatever it is verification exactly. Let's see here. I want to go down to where was the one that I wanted to take a look at there was one about modernizing code development with Dev containers.

Now Dev containers have recently come out from GitHub and Microsoft in general and If you haven't looked at them just on the side if you're not using them today because you know again it's newish. I would recommend going to the session Dev containers are. Pretty cool again.

It's it's nothing Earth shattering if you will. But neither was docker. Well initially, it wasn't right.

It's it's a container if you use lxc before it's like okay just a container who cares but then it won't be on that. So if you haven't if you haven't looked into depth containers yet. This is one session.

I would recommend going to great because good to like if you're using ABS code, how did you deaf containers or whatever exactly? Well the environment? Okay.

What is your ID? Oh, I actually I do use vs code or use pycharm for python. I use kind of a variety thing.

So, you know so you don't use just one tool. No, not at all. Okay.

So this last one will call out here is moving to microservices with Jenkins. Think about it. If I'm trying to piece together microservices, do you think everybody's going to be using the same tools?

Same languages? Right? There's no there's no need to anymore other than standardization within an organization.

So to me and this is for Protege, this is another in the trenches person, right? This is not A vendor if you will so this is gonna be one session that I'm going to try my best. It's around the lunchtime on that Thursday.

But again, you know, this is one that looks really cool to me because if I can simplify microservices and Jenkins together I'm all in and of course, there's other ways to do it too. Right? I'm you know, there's plenty of other tools, but I want to see how they solved it with this specific constraint of using Jenkins and terraform and you know what, you know, this tool set looks from very familiar to my tool set and that's the other thing.

I'm looking through is I'm going through sessions like they're using the same tools. I am these guys aren't So which you know, which way am I going to go for a session? Yeah, I'll probably lean towards the the people using my existing toolset.

Mmm just because there may be something in there that will make my life easier so I can go home at five o'clock and not have to think about work the rest of the weekend. If you will you want things that I noticed about the practitioner track is the topics they're not narrow, but they're focused. In other words, you're not going to get like tons of theory and debates about what you know, what is cloud native mean or do the definition for blah blah.

You're gonna get alright, how do you implement microservices them? How do you go about doing debt containers? What do you you're gonna submit open source for the first year.

It's it's very practical, you know a practitioner but what I mean by that is you should walk out of there with some really good tips tricks information to go apply if that's something you want to do. Yeah, that's true. I believe that last session I wanted to share.

Is there anything you want to poke act? Look at that he actually can I call that one other thing? No, please do.

Okay. It's not about the agenda. but if you're staying on site, which is again, it's at the I'm trying to find the sessions here the Orlando World Center Marriott.

So if you're staying there. included in the resort fee is a bucket of golf balls. And drivers each day that you're there.

Now look I don't play golf. Do I look like I play golf. I don't have time to play golf.

I don't have time for but give me a bucket of balls. I'll go hit something right that's something right. So that's that's included in the resort fee.

So there's other things that are in the resort the it's like, okay, you can get shuttles to Disney or to downtown Disney all those things right? It's just all the typical stuff because it is near the all the parks the primarily the Disney parks. So fantastic.

Do you ever give folks a way to contact you if they were like, I'd like to meet Darren I saw him on this video or I follow your YouTube channel or you know, what the best place to find me two different places, and I'm not very active because I'm always putting out other things, but you can find me on Twitter Darren Pope Darien Pope and also on LinkedIn same handle. Great. And do you post during the conference kind of hey, I saw this cool talk about such and so or well, I guess I will be now thanks much.

That was not sorry. I didn't mean to get you committed to something. That's fine.

No, I need to be doing that. Don't we are we have to do a little bit better? I certainly good.

Well, there has been fascinating talking with you. Thanks. So, you know a lot of great information and good tips for folks.

It really get you know, there's tons of value there. It's just sort of how do you get to it? How do you get the things gonna be most helpful to you?

And I think you've done that and an excellent way. So thanks for joining us. com.

And sign up if you haven't registered already and get your plane ticket or drive down or whatever you're doing and meet up with folks. I'll be there as well. I'll be doing some text wrong TV interviews and going to some sessions.

So looking forward to it. Thanks. Again Darren.

Appreciate you. Thanks, Mitch.