As I am sitting on the 16th floor of the Okura Hotel in Amsterdam in my Batman pyjamas and facing a large mirror, just glimpsing the paper crane that was so lovingly put on my pillow, I’m starting to reflect what has happened during the day. I was lucky enough to be a guest at the DevOps Enterprise Summit. There was certainly plenty of things to get excited about.

I’d meet Gene Kim, who’s been running this conference for 10 years and who wrote the Phoenix Project. He was very warm, welcoming and excited to say hello to little old me.

I’d have a chat with Patrick “the godfather of DevOps” Debois who despite all the accolades lauded on him still sounded like suffering from a massive dose of imposter syndrome. I spoke with Jason Cox (Disney) and to my shame I could not resist making the “you run a Mickey Mouse operation” joke and he still didn’t roll his eyes. And there was Rosalind Radcliffe, IBM research fellow, who gave me a tips on how to survive lightning talks.

What a lovely bunch of people they all are, it is a DevOps community that just would like to help each other out. I was nervous about my own talk and marched into the speakers room about five times and had question after question, and yet it felt comfortable being vulnerable.

So what did I learn today?

Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast

Yum. Breakfast! It was David Keane from HSBC that put that zinger into his slides. And it got even better when he suggested to treat engineers as customers, not the enemy. It was great to see the progress report of their “Double and Half” idea: double deployments and half incidents. Go faster to break less.

What does it mean? My takeaway is that it is really important to encourage teams to deploy more often, which means that changes are smaller. Smaller steps mean less risk.

To me, it is what agile is all about. Small steps follow on from the idea of experimentation and fast feedback.

Speak One Language

Next up was Jagpal Jheeta from the Financial Conduct Authority which regulates the UK financial market. It was really great to see him passionatly speak about working with third party suppliers, trying hard to give them a seat at the table and working to ensure that trust is at the forefront.

Not only is it great to see a regulatory body preaching agile and DevOps (take that, all those people who ever uttered the words “but but the regulator…") but how much that is central to their success.

To me, it is what agile is all about. We value people over process!

Ideas are not the Problem

Following on from that Maya Leibman from American Airlines gave a really entertaining set of steps on how to make the case for change. She mentioned that Gene missed a trick in the Phoenix Project. Everything would have been much easier if they just had brought pizza.

The serious message was that ideas are not the problem. Ideas are easy, it is the execution that is difficult. And the solution is the DevOps mindset. The DevOps culture.

From then on, it was impossible to move at the conference and not find mention of pizza. Just felt a bit strange that pizza was nowhere to be seen on the menu.

Too Much Chat?

More than the chat about two-pizza teams, it was ChatGPT and AI that made the rounds. Now as a self-confessed sceptic, I am still very much sitting on the fence about the AI hype.

Mik Kersten called it a 5x force multiplier in the same way that Open Source transformed the way software is developed. But rather than replacing developers, he envisages that generative AI will free us up to do more in software. To look forward, he cleverly looked backwards and described how the Watt steam engine, which was 5x more efficient than previous engines didn’t reduce the demand for coal, but rather increased it and made steam viable for mills and hence enabled the industrial revolution.

Earlier, Patrick Debois presented us a whistlestop tour of AI possibilities and posited “What if the prompt is the code?”

Now, that set me off thinking. I’ve probably stolen the quote from somewhere (but hey, if an AI is allowed to do it, it’s fair game), but I thought “programmers of the future will need an English Literature degree rather than software skills” - is Java finally going to be pushed into irrelevance not by a less verbose language but by an irritatingly inconsistent one? (e.g. the F sound is the same in “if” and “enough").

Enough of AI already

Now as my day job is all about AppSec, I could not help laughing out loud when Mitun Zavery brought AI and security together: Prompt Kiddies.

Just as Prompt Engineering is going to be an interesting field, attackers will use prompts to generate malicious payloads. Now, there appears to be an arms race going on between the guardrails at ChatGPT et al and ever more entertaining ways to circumvent them. If I remember rightly, the latest way of getting AI to answer a malicious prompt is to threaten someone’s life. Charming!

Final Thoughts

This was on jam-packed Tuesday, full of interesting speakers, thought-provoking chat and interesting ideas. Oh, and I did do my lightning talk on legacy code, which I really rather enjoyed, despite being stressed about not having enough time and having to compete against a fantastic looking dessert table (I think I lost).

Tags does-2023 conference agile security generative-ai

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