Josh Smith

Enterprise Architect

Josh has been in in IT for 15 years, as a developer, lead dev, tech lead, architect, and enterprise architect. He's worked on big teams, small teams, and been on a team of one. In the process of all of this, he's learned a ton, and he loves to mentor and share that information.

He also loves strategy – laying out plans and figuring out dependencies, which order to do things in. Included in this is a deep love of the complicated business + people + culture + tech (especially tech that makes people's lives easier) of IT strategy.

Presentations

The Treasure Map, Hands-On: Chart Your Way to Continuous Delivery

9:00 AM MDT

There is pain inherent in development - monoliths, confusing deployment processes, conflict between dev/ops/security/business… IT is complicated, and hard to do well, and the pace of change expected by customers makes it all even MORE difficult.

It can also be massively overwhelming to try to fix any of these pain points. A plan can help, but…how do you go about making that plan, and how do you share the plan with other people in a way that's easy to understand?

Join Josh and Laine as they talk about how to create a version of this map for your organization - by focusing on what you want to accomplish and the pain points in the way. You'll leave with a version of the problems in the way of accomplishing CD at your organization, along with some “huh, this isn't as overwhelming as it seemed before!”

This workshop will include a lot of discussion and interaction, and probably some feels!

Event-Driven Architecture and Serverless Workshop

8:30 AM MDT

The world around us exists as a collection of events - things that happen and data points that we take in and process and decide what to do about (or not do about), all the time, every day. So…why shouldn't the systems we interact with be structured in the same way?

In this hands-on workshop, Laine and Josh will explain event-driven architecture, and why it's different from traditional monolith and also microservice architecture. They'll explain the pros and cons, and go over some of the technology that's currently out there to implement systems in this more customer-centric way.

They'll also explain more in depth how the serverless model of implementing architecture is especially helpful for accomplishing the goal of event-driven architecture, and then lead you through a workshop that ties it all together using Knative on a Kubernetes cluster (OpenShift).

Event-Driven Architecture and Serverless Workshop

10:30 AM MDT

How to Technology Good - Tips for Implementation at Scale

1:00 PM MDT

Want to bring in [new cool thing X] or [necessary technology change Y] to your company, because you know there's a need for it? GOOD IDEA! Except…now what? If your company is more than about 3 people, how do you explain, enable, and encourage the adoption of this change, especially if it will require some work on everyone’s part?

In How to Technology Good, Josh and Laine will explain how bringing in technology is subject to one of the biggest problems in IT - how to scale it. They'll also talk about tips and tricks for how to be as successful as you can, and the main things to keep track of and watch out for. They'll go through each phase of bringing in new tech, all the way from how to pick your success criteria through what to think about when it comes to maintenance.

Solving Software Delivery Pain: What Hurts and Why it Matters

7:30 PM MDT

There is pain inherent in development - monoliths, confusing deployment processes, conflict between dev/ops/business.

IT is hard and the pace of change now makes it even more difficult. Join Josh and Laine as they talk about how focusing on solving this pain can help in a lot of surprising ways - kickstarting DevOps, speeding up product delivery, and even enabling the business as a whole.

Container Tools: The Next Generation

9:00 AM MDT

CRI-O and Buildah and Podman, OH MY. (…and Skopeo, and what on Earth happened with Docker, and……) Containers are really cool, and also useful. Everyone knows it! The open source community has rallied around them and are constantly making improvements and tweaks to their capabilities. But…the tools generated by those open source communities are constantly evolving, and it ends up really hard to keep up on what does what and…why you should care.

Laine and Josh will explain containers as a whole, their lifecycle, and the tools currently among the landscape of awesome. They'll talk about when you should use what, and they'll demo how it all fits together to help with container-based application development and deployment.

Serverless in Kubernetes: Portable Simplified Ops for Cloud-Native Workloads

11:00 AM MDT

Serverless! Functions as a service! DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION!

…just kidding.

One of the ideas in IT that's been gathering buzz for a while is “serverless.” Or sometimes “functions as a service,” used interchangeably. And…okay, but what does that actually mean? And…how does it help what you're trying to accomplish in your organization?

In this talk, Josh and Laine talk about what serverless is, and what it isn't, along with why you should care and how it can help with actual “digital transformation.” They'll go over the benefits and drawbacks of this method of implementing applications and show a demo of how it works using Knative (https://knative.dev/) on a Kubernetes cluster.

Pivoting in the Noise: Event-Driven Architecture for Customer-Responsive Systems

1:30 PM MDT

Hey! Hey! Hey!

The world around us exists as a collection of events - things that happen and data points that we take in and process and decide what to do about (or not do about), all the time, every day. So…why shouldn't the systems we interact with be structured in the same way?

In this session, Laine and Josh will explain event-driven architecture, and why it's different from traditional monolith and also microservice architecture. They'll explain the pros and cons, and go over some of the technology that's currently out there to implement systems in this more customer-centric way.