Really enjoyed your talk last night, Gwyn. It's so easy to forget the things we use every day are the result of real people getting their hands dirty, sometimes decades ago. It was fun to touch on the most human-centric perspective on things.
DevOps In a Rocket Factory
My first conference talk, DevOps In A Rocket Factory, delivered at DevOps Days Rockies 2025.
When I joined a rocket motor manufacturing company, the software engineering team I joined was invisible: half the factory floor didn't know we existed, and they were the good half! Deployments were fragile and manual, our relationship with IT was poor (IT took three weeks to spin up a VM, and five days for a DNS entry). I was one member on the team, not its lead, but I figured these were my problems to solve. Technically, I moved us to automated commit-triggered deployments and built Terraform-based infrastructure automation. Culturally, I leaned into building team identity around taking pride that we are effective engineering professionals, not cowboys who make it up as we go.
The deeper lesson was that DevOps culture change in manufacturing doesn't require preaching to management, it requires showing people results they've never seen before. I grounded our approach in Conway's Law and the Westrum culture model, shaping communication structures and team artifacts to drive delivery focus. Today that company has dedicated DevOps, platform engineering, and software engineering teams, and leadership considers them essential to the business. Manufacturing companies are a tinder pile for DevOps, and the right practitioner is the spark.
Here is a recording of my talk:
Containers From 10,000 Feet (covering 95 million BC to today)
It was a really fun talk Gwyn. Now I'm craving more deep dives into other linux features!
I delve into the history of the core container isolation primitives, with plenty of quotes from Solomon Hykes (founder of Docker, inc), Jerome Petazonni, the linux kernel mailing list, Poul Henning Kamp, and various whitepapers that were published since 1970. I love reminding an audience that we are part of an community made of incredible human beings, all building on top of each others' ideas.
The title refers to looking at ideas in their broad context, not from a narrow perspective. I do not have a recording at this time, but I do have the slides available to download. The last 3 slides are links to whitepapers that you will absolutely fall in love with, just like I did.