How to Win Friends and Influence Computers

Devops and Continuous Delivery are two of the strongest cultural trends in Operations today, and much has been said about what exactly they entail (and many, many arguments about what they do not.) As Chief Technology Officer for Chef, I've had the pleasure of both observing the behavior of hugely successful organizations and the despair caused by businesses failing to successfully change how they operate.

In this session I'll describe how:

• Devops and Continuous Delivery are reactions to the same fundamental business forces – simply solutions to the problem driven from a different point of view.
• The 5 key drivers of successfully transforming your organization into a healthy, agile, forward-leaning, awesome place to work.
• Why the best advice about automation projects is the worst advice in the face of a transition this huge.

The idea that culture is more important than tools is wrong, if what you care about is actually transforming your behavior.

Why you must be prescriptive about the tool-chain you are going to use, and brook no dissent once you've decided.

How to organize and run the projects that will transform your business into a model of both Devops and Continuous Delivery.

On the way we'll talk about globalization, playing guitar, configuration management, cognitive science, and the propensity of middle management to murder great ideas with the most soft and pleasant of pillows.

It'll be a good time.

Although Adam's talk was not recorded, he gave a similar talk at #ChefConf 2013. Slides and video of that talk are available Chef's site.

About Adam Jacob

Adam Jacob (@admahjk) is a co-founder of Chef and the creator of Chef. Prior to Chef, he founded HJK Solutions, an automated infrastructure consultancy. During two years at HJK, he built new infrastructures for 15 different startups. Including his time at HJK, Adam has 13 years of experience as a systems administrator, systems architect, and tools developer. He has been responsible for large production infrastructures, internal corporate automation, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts.