DeliveryConf Seattle

Last week Seattle hosted the inaugural edition of DeliveryConf. Ten years after Jezz Humble and Dave Farley published the Continuous Delivery Book, DeliveryConf was the first community-driven conference created specifically for this topic. The Tuesday morning opening Keynote was apparently also the first time Jezz and Dave presented together.

As usual, Jezz reiterated over the fact that we have to go back to the very definition of Continuous Integration.

"Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice where developers integrate code into a shared repository frequently, preferably several times a day"


The fact that this still needs mentioning is a clear sign that the knowledge and experience on how to do CI/CD are definitely not spread as far as we would like it to be.

The Format at DeliveryConf

DeliveryConf experimented with a new unique format, 30-minute talks followed by 20 minutes of group discussion. Rather than allowing for a lengthy Q&A with the speaker.

The group discussion, reminding us of open spaces were aimed at bringing the discussion to the practitioners in the room. With 3 fixed questions around the topic, the audience got more engaged in the discussion.

  • What are your successes?
  • What are your failures?
  • What do you want to see in the next 5 years?

Where regular open spaces aren’t recorded, these group discussions were facilitated by the organizers and were also recorded.

Notable talks at Deliveryconf

DAY 1

James Wickett about Pragmatic Security.

To me, pragmatic security is a very important topic as we definitely don’t see enough security awareness yet.

Cat Swetel and Jimmy Judd about CI/CD for VAX.

This talk proved that CI/CD is not just for unicorns on their shiny new greenfield platforms but that you can also benefit from implementing CI/CD on older platforms.

Bryan Liles on re-imagining Continuous

Bryan Liles wrapped up day 1 with a fun vision on CI/CD and a call for more simplicity.

DAY 2

The 2nd-day opening panel featured Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Caleb Hailey, Dr. Rebecca Parsons, and Brooke Treadgold. A vivid discussion of the current state of CI/CD. The most notable statement probably coming from Nicole. When asked where the panel saw CI/CI in 5 years from now she answered: “People finally doing this”.

Next to the talks, there was a vibrant hallway track, where different discussions about doing continuous delivery for Infrastructure happened.

Conclusion

While some communities have figured out how to do this years ago. The younger Infrastructure as Code communities are still struggling and learning how to test their code. And it’s not the IAC communities. it’s everybody.

While the concepts and ideas behind Continuous Delivery have been around for over 10 years, the knowledge and experience on how to do this are definitely not evenly distributed yet.