Community Talks

Join us for our first fall Meetup. The night will feature two 25 min talks from our community. Here they are:

First Talk

Automation in Deployment Pipelines by Jason DeGeorge

Continuous integration, continuous deployment, and the holy grail, continuous delivery! Picture new features and bug fixes seemlessly flowing through your deployment pipeline from the development directly to production. That sounds amazing! But getting to that point has proven to be a challenge. Teams have to navigate project process, engineering and QA policies, tools, automation suites, release engineering, devops automation, and application architecture. Not to mention all the humans who have to build and maintain these systems. The easy answer of "Automate everything" doesn't tell the whole story.

Jason DeGeorge has been managing technology and technology teams for the past 15 years at some notable technology companies in the Boston Area. Before PlatformQ, Jason served as Vice President of Engineering/Technology at Nellymoser where he managed the Engineering, Systems and IT Departments. He built Nellymoser's server team and was responsible for the technical direction and implementation architecture. Before Nellymoser, Jason served as CTO of Q2 Technologies, where he was responsible for delivering high volume, innovative solutions as well as leading the company into new technology areas. He has over 18 years of experience designing, implementing, deploying and managing multi-tiered applications in new markets. Mr. DeGeorge studied Computer Science and Mathematics at Wesleyan University, Boston University, and Harvard University. He currently holds a Bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University in Mathematics.

Second Talk

"Large Scale Development Culture Change: Google and the US Government" by Mike Bland

In October 2013, the disastrous rollout of the healthcare.org (http://healthcare.org/) website created a crisis for the Obama administration. In the wake of the successful recovery from this crisis, an opportunity has emerged to bring development practices throughout the US government up-to-date with modern industry standards. Having helped drive widespread development culture change at Google, I have been recruited to join the effort to reform government IT. In this talk, I will summarize the organizational and psychological obstacles to driving adoption of automated testing at Google, the strategies and tactics the Testing Grouplet and others employed to overcome them over the course of five years, and map these experiences to the current state of affairs within the Federal government as I currently understand them.

Mike Bland was a software developer at Google from 2005 to 2011. Prior to working on websearch infrastructure, Mike led the Testing Grouplet and Fixit Grouplet; was a member of the Test Mercenaries, Testing Tech, and Build Tools teams; and was instrumental in bringing about the development culture changes that made thorough developer testing the accepted cultural norm. Having taken three years off from the industry and studying at Berklee College of Music, he has recently published articles forCommunications of the ACM and Martin Fowler's website that use early 2014's "goto fail" and Heartbleed bugs to press for greater accountability and adoption of automated testing amongst developers, is working with the OpenSSL team to improve its automated testing, and is soon to join the effort to reform US government IT. http://mike-bland.com (http://mike-bland.com/)