Sheffield is the city of steel, and at the heart of it lies a lovely university building - the Owen building that hosted the North’s premier hacker con And I had been accepted to talk at SteelCon about AppSec and Agile and who wouldn’t want to drive over Snake Pass to cross into the wrong side of the Pennines. [Ducks]. Over the past year, I found myself going to quite a few community infosec events (I did the Northern BSides triathlon last year - Lancs, Leeds and Newcastle) and I feel like becoming part this family and have always felt really welcomed in this anarchic environment where leaf blowers and complaints desks take on special meanings.

After the fantastic experience of speaking at Agile on the Beach 2023 a year before, I was back for more agile. This meant more driving: again I took the motorway barge for the long road trip from the North West to almost the tip of the South West. For international readers, when I say North West, I mean England, somewhere near Preston, and the South West is in pretty Falmouth, Kernow (Cornwall).

Once again, I’m sat at Schipol Airport typing up my thoughts about a few days of refreshing Dutch DevOps Goodness! Ok, I admit one or five alcoholic beverages might have been involved too. This was my first DevOpsDays and it did not disappoint. My day started at 3am to catch a flight at 6am but because I was still awake at 1:30 and had decided sleep is for wimps, I arrived a little bit wired.

Following a quip on LinkedIn about the introduction of Recall in Copilot+ and Kevin Beaumont’s great piece about why this is a really bad idea from a security point of view, I got thinking: This is dystopian techno-fascism Kevin posited a disconnect in Microsoft that led to the creation of this feature and whether people really wanted it. Personally, I’ve got a brain like a sieve and would not know the command line without ~/.

Many conferences have a hallway track, I loved that Agile Manchester had a jigsaw track. The organisers put out a jigsaw on a big table where attendees could mingle over searching through the 2000 pieces and chat at the same time. Such a great way of breaking the ice. And such a brilliant metaphor. A complex task is achieved through self organisation. Teams self-select and offer assistance all without intervention and imposed coordination or management.

When I stumbled across a post that an encryption library offers a potential backdoor to SSH connectivity on Good Friday, my first thought was: why is it always on a Friday that these things drop? And then my second one: oh bugger, here goes my weekend. Now, I won’t go into the technical details, there are many, many, many, many better resources out there, but I can’t help thinking that this would/should force the software industry to think.

Peter Drucker said “What gets measured, gets managed”. When I turned up at Old Trafford, home of Manchester’s red team (it’s a security conference, geddit) for The Future of Cyber, I certainly was measurably impressed by the setting even though I’m usually found more on the blue spectrum of infosec. But let’s get into the talks! Measure, measure, measure First, Greg Notch talked about the importance of using metrics in communication.

About two months ago I stumbled across a great YouTube video of a talk by Charity Majors called Compliance standards should be modern development practices. Now let’s step back for a minute. Am I seriously suggesting that anything with the word “compliance” is going to be a riveting watch? Why, yes I am. And with good reason. I’m a fan of good security and I like agile. And I think one of the major stumbling blocks about putting Sec into DevOps is to forget the agile origins of DevOps culture.

Last year was exciting, it was my first time going to a DevOps Enterprise Summit and meeting Gene Kim was very cool. The conference didn’t actually start on Tuesday, there was a little session on Monday as people were trickling in from all over the world. And in said session, Gene presented his latest project. He was writing a book with Steven Spears called Wiring the Winning Organisation. If I’m honest, I am not a fan of the title.

After the glimmer of hope on day 3 I was quite optimistic for the day 4 puzzle. I kept going with the phind-codellama model. I continued with keeping the model on a fairly tight leash and just being very specific as to what I wanted it to do. What’s the puzzle? So, for the first part, we had to parse a text file and then match up numbers and winning numbers.