March 2021 Seattle DevOps Meetup - Yes, we are back!

Hello Seattle DevOps Meetup friends! 🙌🏽

Meetups will continue to be held during one Wednesday each month via Zoom. Each meetup will feature 2 talks about 20 minutes long with 5 minutes reserved for Q+A. No product demo or pitches please—we want to focus on learning, not selling.

Agenda:

4:00pm - Welcome + Networking
4:15pm - 4:45pm - Aaron Aldrich - Sticking Together while Staying Apart: Resilience in the Time of Global Pandemic
4:45pm - 5:15pm - Quintessence Anx - Prevent Heroism: How to Work Today to Reduce Work Tomorrow
5:15pm - Wrap up

** Times are approximate

Aaron Aldrich - Cloud Adoption @ Redhat

Talk title: Sticking Together while Staying Apart: Resilience in the Time of Global Pandemic

Abstract: Everything is a little bit broken all of the time. Sometimes, like recently, as in right now, the core truths and assumptions about the universe seem to be shifted out from underneath us without warning. And yet, Netflix streams movies, GitHub serves code, we all keep going and working from home and surviving. These systems, both technical and social, are resilient. And through their resilience they are able to handle all those one-in-a-million occurrences that crop up nine-times-in-ten. But what does it mean to be resilient? And further, how can we recognize and grow this resilience to better deal with the systemic surprises we’re dealing with right now and in the future? What does a resilient team look like, and how do you foster that?

This talk will answer:

• What is Resilience?
• How can we create resilience in ourselves, teams and systems?
• How do our networks of systems (people, teams, organizations, applications) create resilience for each other?
• What happens when major systems and networks fail?
• How can we discover and foster resilience in our people, teams and systems?

Quintessence Anx - Developer Advocate @ PagerDuty

Talk title: Prevent Heroism: How to Work Today to Reduce Work Tomorrow

Abstract: Reactive work is a massive time and value sink, but unfortunately existing gaps in team structure and/or metrics don’t capture “what’s missing”. For example, how do you track calls not placed, outages that never occurred? Traditional structures and metrics don’t necessarily capture this shift, yet everyone benefits from a better user experience - i.e. the unplaced call or outage. In this talk I’m going to discuss:

• Level set: explain the concept “upstream work”, as defined by Dan Heath in his book Upstream
• Explain why this focus is important
• Discuss how teams can start to shift from reactive work to proactive work, * i.e. move upstream; including shifting reward structures away from Heroes Cover how to use metrics to support this shift in practice