✨ Series: Getting to know the wonderful Continuous Delivery Community
Steve Fenton
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Location: Hampshire, UK
Who are you?
I’ve been working in software for more than 20 years. I’ve been lucky to work with really smart people on a wondrous variety of technologies and industries. I now work for Octopus Deploy where I write about DevOps, continuous delivery, automation, and related subjects. I’m the author of “Pro TypeScript,” “Web Ops Dashboards, Monitoring, and Alerting,” and “Exploring Octopus Deploy.”
What are your hobbies?
I’m a musician, which I think is a useful career-adjacent hobby because music and programming have a strange connection in the human brain. I love reading books, especially old-school Gothic novels (La Fanu, Shelley, Radcliffe) and legendary detective duos (Holmes/Watson, Poirot/Hastings, and Poe/Bradshaw).
What did you want to be when you were a kid?
When I was young, I was convinced I was going to work in archeology and heritage. I believed this all the way through school. I even did work experience at City Heritage in Southampton, UK, which was amazing. However, when I hit college age, I couldn’t find enough courses that aligned with my dreams. I was pretty disengaged with half of what they offered, while I enjoyed Classics, History of Art was a huge disappointment.
What led you to a career in tech?
I took a nontraditional route into tech. I didn’t study computer science, and I hope to demonstrate that you don’t have to have a computer-related degree to forge a career in our industry. I was seconded to a software project from my role in compliance and left as a programmer. It wouldn’t have been possible without those developers who chose to mentor me, instead of being gatekeepers.
Do you remember your first open source contribution?
My first open source project was a Kanban board called Web Sticky Notes. It was hosted on CodePlex, which is long gone now. It was similar to Trello, which didn’t exist at the time, and it was nowhere near as good as the tools available today. My first contribution to someone else’s project came much later.
How did you get involved in the Continuous Delivery Foundation?
I found the CDF through its research and joined the outreach committee to help spread the word about its work. As part of the outreach committee, I’ve written blog posts, helped select conference sessions, and joined panel discussions on the CDF Techstrong.TV channel.
What is your favorite thing/project/tech to work on?
I like to act as an expanding gap filler when I work on a team. I’m attracted to whatever the other team members want to avoid, which has given me the opportunity to go deep on databases, builds, test automation, deployment pipelines, and tricky integration work. Automation is my favorite kind of work as you can see its impact immediately.
Tell us about the thing you’re most proud of and why?
I’m disproportionately proud of the teams I’ve built over the years. Having worked with truly smart people early in my software career, I developed a good grasp of the shape of a great team. I managed to assemble a few of them over the years.
What is the best connection you’ve made through open source?
The Definitely Typed project was an incredible open source effort. Boris Yankov started the project, and through it I also met Basarat Ali Syed and John Reilly. Recently, I connected with Thomas Breuss thanks to his amazing contributions to the Enhance PHP project. He’s brought some much-needed discipline to that repository, and I’m super grateful!
What is your #1 top tip for getting involved in the community?
I had no idea how I could help the community, so I just turned up and listened. Being there was the necessary step to finding out how I could help. I’ve found so much support and encouragement through the community and I hope you will, too.
What’s your favorite open source conference?
I’m not playing to my audience when I say that cdCon is special. It’s not just about specific tools, it covers technical practices, too. Without the techniques, the tools never deliver the expected benefits. The cdCon schedules always balance this well and I was delighted to help out with some of the recent events, where I discovered how tough it is to put a schedule together.
Where can we find you?
More from Steve
Read Steve’s blog post, The Journey of DevOps Tooling Adoption, about the State of CI/CD Report 2024 and watch the Techstrong.TV panel about the report ⬇️
Steve is also on the Program Committee for the upcoming Continuous Delivery Mini Summit in Vienna, Austria on September 19, in co-location with Open Source Summit Europe.
