Contributed by Neil McGonigle, Fidelity Investments
Brian Neary and I recently had the fantastic opportunity to travel to the Open Source Summit Europe for 2023 which was hosted in the beautiful Spanish city of Bilbao from September 18–21.
I’d like to recount some of the highlights and themes we heard over the course of the week.
We kicked off on Monday at the Continuous Delivery Mini Summit which was hosted by the Continuous Delivery Foundation. This half-day event was held in co-location with the Open Source Summit Europe 2023.
The event aimed to connect the Continuous Delivery (CD) community—from leaders, industry experts, practitioners, and open source developers—to share and discuss how to improve the world’s capacity to deliver software with security and speed.
As an elected member of the CDF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) I was fortunate enough to be offered the opportunity to facilitate this event including introducing all of our speakers and hosting an in-depth panel discussion on Developer Experience (DX).
Learnings from the Speakers
Highly-Performing Teams
We kicked off the CD Mini Summit at 9 a.m. with a really engaging session by Jeremey Meiss who is an independent Director of DevRel (Developer Relations). Jeremy talked about what it really means to refer to “highly-performing teams” and what practical steps we need to take to create them. He also used Monty Python references and animated GIFs in his presentation which added to the engagement :).
Tekton Chains
Jeremy was followed by Natale Vinto who is a Developer advocate at Red Hat. His talk was about Tekton Chains which are a key element in building secure supply chain management. Natale used practical examples to demonstrate Tekton Chains and it was a highly informative session. Tekton Chains is a Kubernetes Custom Resource Definition (CRD) controller – it basically allows you to manage your CICD process natively in K8S. The demo was really powerful and the example used was updating live inventory in the RedHat online store.
Deployment Practices
Anna Daugherty was next up. Anna’s flight was delayed so she was literally just in the door and up on stage! 🙂 She handled that with no problem and gave a super talk about deployment challenges and how continuous deployment practices can help to address these. In Anna’s talk, we again heard about the relationship between good CD/DevOps practices and highly performing teams. She also talked to the value of DORA metrics and the role they play in understanding CD health.
We had a well-earned break at this point as people filed out of room 3F to find caffeine! They didn’t have to look long – multi-day tech events like this are fuelled by coffee.
Engagement and Test Integrations
After the break we had two more speakers – Lori Lorusso, Outreach Chair at the CD Foundation, and Ole Lensmar, CTO at Testkube. Lori told us all about how to drive engagement once you’ve launched your open source project, and Ole talked in detail about how to leverage the CDEvents open source project to drive effective test integration in your CI/CD pipelines.
Developer Experience
At this point, it was time for a 40-minute Q&A panel on the wide-ranging subject of developer experience. In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the role of developers has become more critical than ever before. This panel aimed to delve into the intricacies of Developer Experience (DX) and its direct impact on productivity, innovation, and overall project success. The discussion revolved around the strategies, tools, best practices, and culture that organizations can adopt to create an environment conducive to fostering developer creativity, collaboration, and efficiency.
Some of the key points that were raised during our Q&A on DX:
- The importance of Culture when it comes to empowering and enabling a positive developer experience
- The importance of diversity in all of its guises! Cognitive, experiential, individuality, neuro, etc.
- Technical aspects of DX – importance of visibility and automation
- Talked about resistive to change or conservative work cultures
Culture came up throughout the conversation – much more so than technical aspects of the Developer Experience. This was noteworthy. How we work together, how we support, collaborate, communicate and empower is critically important in overcoming technical challenges and creating an environment of innovation and success.
That was the close of the CD Mini Summit which was a pleasure to facilitate on behalf of the CDF.
Event Recording 🔴
If you missed the event, you can watch the recording in the YouTube Playlist ⬇️
