Beyond the Code 2016 recap

I've had the opportunity to attend the Beyond the Code conference for the past two years.  This year, the venue moved to a location in Toronto, the last two events had been held in Ottawa.  The conference is organized by Shopify who again managed to have a really great speaker line up this year on a variety of interesting topics.  It was a two track conference so I'll summarize some of the talks I attended.  

The conference started off with Anna Lambert of Shopify welcoming everyone to the conference.

The first speaker was Atlee Clark, Director of App and Developer relations at Shopify who discussed the wheel of diversity.

The wheel of diversity is a way of mapping the characteristics that you're born with (age, gender, gender expression, race or ethnicity, national origin, mental/physical ability), along with those that you acquire through life (appearance, education, political belief, religion, income, language and communication skills, work experience, family,  organizational role).  When you look at your team, you can map how diverse it is by colour.  (Of course, some of these characteristics are personal and might not be shared with others).  You can see how diverse the team is by mapping different characteristics with different colours.  If you map your team and it's mostly the same colour, then you probably will not bring different perspectives together when you work because you all have similar backgrounds and life experiences.  This is especially important when developing products. 

This wheel also applies to hiring too.  You want to have different perspectives when you're interviewing someone.  Atlee mentioned when she was hiring for a new role, she mapped out the characteristics of the people who would be conducting the hiring interviews and found there was a lot of yellow.

So she switched up the team that would be conducting the interviews to include people with more diverse perspectives.

She finished by stating that this is just a tool, keep it simple, and practice makes it better. 

The next talk was by Erica Joy, who is a build and release engineer at Slack, as well as a diversity advocate.  I have to admit, when I saw she was going to speak at Beyond the Code, I immediately pulled out my credit card and purchased a conference ticket.  She is one of my tech heroes.  Not only did she build the build and release pipeline at Slack from the ground up, she is an amazing writer and advocate for change in the tech industry.   I highly recommend reading everything she has written on Medium, her chapter in Lean Out and all her discussions on twitter.  So fantastic.

Her talk at the conference was "Building a Diverse Corporate Culture: Diversity and Inclusion in Tech".  She talked about how literally thousands of companies say they value inclusion and diversity.  However, few talk about what they are willing to give up to order to achieve it.  Are you willing to give up your window seat with a great view?   Something else so that others can be paid fairly?  She mentioned that change is never free.  People need both mentorship and sponsorship in in order to progress in their career.

I really liked her discussion around hiring and referrals.  She stated that when you're hire people you already know you're probably excluding equally or better qualified that you don't know.  By default, women of colour are underpaid.

Pay gap for white woman, African American women and Hispanic women compared to a white man in the United States.

Some companies have referral system to give larger referral bonuses to people who are underrepresented in tech, she gave the example of Intel which has this in place.  This is a way to incentivize your referral system so you don't just hire all your white friends.  

The average white American has 91 white friends and one black friend so it's not very likely that they will refer non-white people. Not sure what the numbers are like in Canada but I'd guess that they are quite similar.

  
In addition, don't ask people to work for free, to speak at conferences or do diversity and inclusion work.  Her words were "We can't pay rent with exposure".

Spend time talking to diversity and inclusion experts.  There are people that have spent their entire lives conducting research in this area and you can learn from their expertise.  Meritocracy is a myth, we are just lucky to be in the right place in the right time.  She mentioned that her colleague Duretti Hirpa at Slack points out the need for accomplices, not allies. People that will actually speak up for others.  So people feeling pain or facing a difficult work environment don't have to do all the work of fighting for change. 

In most companies, there aren't escalation paths for human issues either.  If a person is making sexist or racist remarks, shouldn't that be a firing offense? 

If people were really working hard on diversity and inclusion, we would see more women and people of colour on boards and in leadership positions.  But we don't.

She closed with a quote from Beyonce:

"If everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow"

💜💜💜

The next talk I attended was by Coraline Ada Ehmke, who is an application engineer at Github.  Her talk was about the "Broken Promise of Open Source".  Open source has the core principals of the free exchange of ideas, success through collaboration, shared ownership and meritocracy.

However, meritocracy is a myth.  Currently, only 6% of Github users are women.  The environment can be toxic, which drives a lot of people away.  She mentioned that we don't have numbers for diversity in open source other than women, but Github plans to do a survey soon to try to acquire more data.

Gabriel Fayant from Assembly of Seven Generation's talk was entitled "Walking in Both Worlds, traditional ways of being and the world of technology".  I found this quite interesting, she talked about traditional ceremonies and how they promote the idea of living in the moment, and thus looking at your phone during a drum ceremony isn't living the full experience.  A question from the audience from someone who worked in the engineering faculty at the University of Toronto was how we can work with indigenous communities to share our knowledge of the technology and make youth both producers of tech, not just consumers. 

If everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/beyoncekno596349.html

f everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/beyoncekno596349.html

The next talk was by Sandi Metz, entitled "Madame Santi tells your future".  This was a totally fascinating look at the history of printing text from scrolls all the way to computers.

She gave the same talk at another conference earlier so you watch it here.  It described the progression of printing technology from 7000 years ago until today.  Each new technology disrupted the previous one, and it was difficult for those who worked on the previous technology to make the jump to work on the new one. 

So according to Sandi, what is your future?

• What you are working on now probably won't be relevant in 10 years
• You will all die
• All the people you love will die
• Your body will start to fail you
• Life is short
• Tell people that you love them
• Guard your health
• Spend time with your kids
• Get some exercise (she loves to bike)
• We are bigger than tech
• Community and schools need help
• She gave the example of Habitat for Humanity where she volunteers
• These organizations also need help to write code, they might not have the knowledge or time to do it right

The last talk I attended was by Sabrina Geremia of Google Canada.  She talked about the factors that encourage a girl to consider computer science (encouragement, career perception, self-perception and academic exposure.)

I found that this talk was interesting but it focused a bit too much on the pipeline argument - that the major problem is that girls are not enrolling in CS courses.  If you look at all the problems with environment, culture, lack of pay equity and opportunities for promotion due to bias, maybe choosing a career where there is more diversity is a better choice.  For instance, law, accounting and medicine have much better numbers for these issues, despite there still being an imbalance.

At the end of the day, there was a panel to discuss diversity issues:

Moderator: Ariti Sharma, Shopify, Panelists: Mohammed Asaduallah, Format, Katie Krepps, Capital One Canada, Lateesha Thomas, Dev Bootcamp, Ramya Raghavan, Google, Kara Melton, TWG, Gladstone Grant, Microsoft Canada

Some of my notes from the panel

• Be intentional about seeking out talent
• Fix culture to be more diverse
• Recruit from bootcamps. Better diversity today.  Don't wait for universities to change the ratios.
• Environment impacts retention
• Conduct and engagement survey to see if underrepresented groups feel that their voices are being heard.
• There is a need for sponsorship, not just mentoring.  Define a role that doesn't exist at the company.  A sponsor can make that role happen by advocating for it at higher levels
• Mentors do better if matched with demographics.  They will realize the challenges that you will face in the industry better than a white man who has never directly experienced sexism or racism.
• Sponsors tend to be men due to the demographics of our industry
• At Microsoft, when you reach a certain level your are expected to mentor an unrepresented person
• Look at compensation and representation across diverse groups
• Attrition is normal, it varies by region, especially acute in San Francisco.
• Women leave companies at 2x the rate of men due to culture
• You shouldn't stay at a place if you are burnt out, take care of yourself.

Compared to the previous two iterations of this conference, it seemed that this time it focused a lot more on solutions to have more diversity and inclusion in your company. The previous two conferences I attended seemed to focus more on technical talks by diverse speakers.


As a side note, there were a lot of Shopify folks in attendance because they ran the conference.  They sent a bus of people from their head office in Ottawa to attend it.  I was really struck at how diverse some of the teams were.  I met group of women who described themselves as a team of "five badass women developers" 💯 As someone who has been the only woman on her team for most of her career, this was beautiful to see and gave me hope for the future of our industry.   I've visited the Ottawa Shopify office several times (Mr. Releng works there) and I know that the representation of of their office doesn't match the demographics of the Beyond the Code attendees which tended to be more women and people of colour.  But still, it is refreshing to see a company making a real effort to make their culture inclusive.  I've read that it is easier to make your culture inclusive from the start, rather than trying to make difficult culture changes years later when your teams are all homogeneous. So kudos to them for setting an example for other companies.

Thank you Shopify for organizing this conference, I learned a lot and I look forward to the next one!

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USENIX Release Engineering Summit 2015 recap

November 13th, I attended the USENIX Release Engineering Summit in Washington, DC.  This summit was along side the larger LISA conference at the same venue. Thanks to Dinah McNutt, Gareth Bowles, Chris Cooper,  Dan Tehranian and John O'Duinn for organizing.

I gave two talks at the summit.  One was a long talk on how we have scaled our Android testing infrastructure on AWS, as well as a look back at how it evolved over the years.

Picture by Tim Norris - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tim_norris/2600844073/sizes/o/

Scaling mobile testing on AWS: Emulators all the way down from Kim Moir

I gave a second lightning talk in the afternoon on the problems we face with our large distributed continuous integration, build and release pipeline, and how we are working to address the issues. The theme of this talk was that managing a large distributed system is like being the caretaker for the water, or some days, the sewer system for a city.  We are constantly looking system leaks and implementing system monitoring. And probably will have to replace it with something new while keeping the existing one running.

Picture by Korona Lacasse - Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution 2.0 Generic https://www.flickr.com/photos/korona4reel/14107877324/sizes/l

Distributed Systems at Scale: Reducing the Fail from Kim Moir

In preparation for this talk, I did a lot of reading on complex systems design and designing for recovery from failure in distributed systems.  In particular, I read Donatella Meadows' book Thinking in Systems. (Cate Huston reviewed the book here). I also watched several talks by people who talked about the challenges they face managing their distributed systems including the following:

• All Your Base 2014: Laura Thomson, Director of Engineering, Cloud Services Engineering and Operations, Mozilla – Many moving parts: monitoring complex systems
• Velocity Santa Clara 2015:  Astrid Atkinson, Director Software Engineering, Google - Engineering for the long game:  Managing complexity in distributed systems
• Mountain West Ruby Conference, Paul Hinze, Hashicorp - Primitives of High Availability
• Strange Loop 2015, Camille Fournier - Hopelessness and Confidence in Distributed Systems Design 

I'd also like to thank all the members of Mozilla releng/ateam who reviewed my slides and provided feedback before I gave the presentations.

The attendees of the summit attended the same keynote as the LISA attendees.  Jez Humble, well known for his Continuous Delivery and Lean Enterprise books provided a keynote on Lean Configuration Management which I really enjoyed. (Older version of slides from another conference, are available here and here.)

In particular, I enjoyed his discussion of the cultural aspects of devops. I especially like that he stated that "You should not have to have planned downtime or people working outside business hours to release".  He also talked a bit about how many of the leaders that are looked up to as visionaries in the tech industry are known for not treating people very well and this is not a good example to set for others who believe this to be the key to their success.  For instance, he said something like "what more could Steve Jobs have accomplished had he treated his employees less harshly".

Another concept he discussed which I found interesting was that of the strangler application. When moving from a large monolithic application, the goal is to split out the existing functionality into services until the originally application is left with nothing.  Exactly what Mozilla releng is doing as we migrate from Buildbot to taskcluster.

http://www.slideshare.net/jezhumble/architecting-for-continuous-delivery-54192503

At the release engineering summit itself,   Lukas Blakk from Pinterest gave a fantastic talk Stop Releasing off Your Laptop—Implementing a Mobile App Release Management Process from Scratch in a Startup or Small Company.  This included grumpy cat picture to depict how Lukas thought the rest of the company felt when that a more structured release process was implemented.

Lukas also included a timeline of the tasks that implemented in her first six months working at Pinterest. Very impressive to see the transition!

Another talk I enjoyed was Chaos Patterns - Architecting for Failure in Distributed Systems by Jos Boumans of Krux. (Similar slides from an earlier conference here). He talked about some high profile distributed systems that failed and how chaos engineering can help illuminate these issues before they hit you in production.

For instance, it is impossible for Netflix to model their entire system outside of production given that they consume around one third of nightly downstream bandwidth consumption in the US. 

Evan Willey and Dave Liebreich from Pivotal Cloud Foundry gave a talk entitled "Pivotal Cloud Foundry Release Engineering: Moving Integration Upstream Where It Belongs". I found this talk interesting because they talked about how the built Concourse, a CI system that is more scaleable and natively builds pipelines.   Travis and Jenkins are good for small projects but they simply don't scale for large numbers of commits, platforms to test or complicated pipelines. We followed a similar path that led us to develop Taskcluster. 

There were many more great talks, hopefully more slides will be up soon!

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Releng 2015 program now available

Releng 2015 will take place in concert with ICSE in Florence, Italy on May 19, 2015. The program is now available. Register here!

via romana in firenze by ©pinomoscato, Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

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Releng 2015 CFP now open

Florence, Italy.  Home of beautiful architecture.

Il Duomo di Firenze by ©runner310, Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

Delicious food and drink.

Panzanella by © Pete Carpenter, Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

Caffè ristretto by © Marcelo César Augusto Romeo, Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

And next May, release engineering :-)

The CFP for Releng 2015 is now open.  The deadline for submissions is January 23, 2015.  It will be held on May 19, 2015 in Florence Italy and co-located with ICSE 2015.   We look forward to seeing your proposals about the exciting work you're doing in release engineering!

If you have questions about the submission process or anything else, please contact any of the program committee members. My email is kmoir and I work at mozilla.com.

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Scaling capacity while saving cash

There was a very interesting release engineering summit this Monday held in concert with LISA in Seattle.  I was supposed fly there this past weekend so I could give a talk on Monday but late last week I became ill and was unable to go.   Which was very disappointing because the summit looked really great and I was looking forward to meeting the other release engineers and learning about the challenges they face.

Scale in the Market  ©Clint Mickel, Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

Although I didn't have the opportunity to give the talk in person, the slides for it are available on slideshare and my mozilla people account   The talk describes how we scaled our continuous integration infrastructure on AWS to handle double the amount of pushes it handled in early 2013, all while reducing our AWS monthly bill by 2/3.

Cost per push from Oct 2012 until Oct 2014. This does not include costs for on premise equipment. It reflects our monthly AWS bill divided by the number of monthly pushes (commits).  The chart reflects costs from October 2012-2014.

Thank you to Dinah McNutt and the other program committee members for organizing this summit.  I look forward to watching the talks once they are online.

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Beyond the Code 2014: a recap

I started this blog post about a month ago and didn't finish it because well, life is busy.  

I attended Beyond the Code last September 19.  I heard about it several months ago on twitter.  A one-day conference about celebrating women in computing, in my home town, with an fantastic speaker line up?  I signed up immediately.   In the opening remarks, we were asked for a show of hands to show how many of us were developers, in design,  product management, or students and there was a good representation from all those categories.  I was especially impressed to see the number of students in the audience, it was nice to see so many of them taking time out of their busy schedule to attend.

View of the Parliament Buildings and Chateau Laurier from the MacKenzie street bridge over the Rideau Canal

Ottawa Conference Centre, location of Beyond the Code

 
There were seven speakers, three workshop organizers, a lunch time activity, and a panel at the end. The speakers were all women.  The speakers were not all white women or all heterosexual women.  There were many young women, not all industry veterans :-) like me.  To see this level of diversity at a tech conference filled me with joy.  Almost every conference I go to is very homogenous in the make up of the speakers and the audience.  To to see ~200 tech women in at conference and 10% men (thank you for attending:-) was quite a role reversal.

I completely impressed by the caliber of the speakers.  They were simply exceptional.

The conference started out with Kronda Adair giving a talk on Expanding Your Empathy.  One of the things that struck me from this talk was that she talked about how everyone lives in a bubble, and they don't see things that everyone does due to privilege.  She gave the example of how privilege is like a browser, and colours how we see the world.  For a straight white guy a web age looks great when they're running the latest Chrome on MacOSx.  For a middle class black lesbian, the web page doesn't look as great because it's like she's running IE7.  There is less inherent privilege.  For a "differently abled trans person of color" the world is like running IE6 in quirks mode. This was a great example. She also gave a shout out to the the Ascend Project which she and Lukas Blakk are running in Mozilla Portland office. Such an amazing initiative.

The next speaker was Bridget Kromhout who gave talk about Platform Ops in the Public Cloud.
I was really interested in this talk because we do a lot of scaling of our build infrastructure in AWS and wanted to see if she had faced similar challenges. She works at DramaFever, which she described as Netflix for Asian soap operas.  The most interesting things to me were the fact that she used all AWS regions to host their instances, because they wanted to be able to have their users download from a region as geographically close to them as possible.  At Mozilla, we only use a couple of AWS regions, but more instances than Dramafever, so this was an interesting contrast in the services used. In addition, the monitoring infrastructure they use was quite complex.  Her slides are here.

I was going to summarize the rest of the speakers but Melissa Jean Clark did an exceptional job on her blog.  You should read it!

Thank you Shopify for organizing this conference.  It was great to meet some many brilliant women in the tech industry! I hope there is an event next year too!

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2014 USENIX Release Engineering Summit CFP now open

The CFP for the 2014 Release Engineering summit (Western edition) is now open.  The deadline for submissions is September 5, 2014 and speakers will be notified by September 19, 2014.  The program will be announced in late September.  This one day summit on all things release engineering will be held in concert with LISA, in Seattle on November 10, 2014. 

Seattle skyline © Howard Ignatius, https://flic.kr/p/6tQ3H Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

From the CFP

"Suggestions for topics include (but are not limited to):

• Best practices for release engineering
• Practical information on specific aspects of release engineering (e.g., source code management, dependency management, packaging, unit tests, deployment)
• Future challenges and opportunities in release engineering
• Solutions for scalable end-to-end release processes
• Scaling infrastructure and tools for high-volume continuous integration farms
• War and horror stories
• Metrics
• Specific problems and solutions for specific markets (mobile, financial, cloud)

URES '14 West is looking for relevant and engaging speakers and workshop facilitators for our event on November 10, 2014, in Seattle, WA. URES brings together people from all areas of release engineering—release engineers, developers, managers, site reliability engineers, and others—to identify and help propose solutions for the most difficult problems in release engineering today."

War and horror stories. I like to see that in a CFP.  Describing how you overcame problems with  infrastructure and tooling to ship software are the best kinds of stories.  They make people laugh. Maybe cry as they realize they are currently living in that situation.  Good times.  Also, I think talks around scaling high volume continuous integration farms will be interesting.  Scaling issues are a lot of fun and expose many issues you don't see when you're only running a few builds a day. 

If you have any questions surrounding the CFP, I'm happy to help as I'm on the program committee.   (my irc nick is kmoir (#releng) as is my email id at mozilla.com)

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Upcoming Release Engineering events

University of Waterloo engineering students in 1964 Image ©Kitchener Waterloo Record, http://www.flickr.com/photos/48169267@N08/4967256177/in/photolist-8yWucT-eqaQdV-epd6Lw-c5ywEJ-c5yvwd/under Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

 
There are quite a few upcoming events related to release engineering so I thought I'd list them here.

The CFP for LISA is open, submissions due April 14.  Release engineering topics are welcome. LISA is November 9–14, 2014, in Seattle, WA.

There is also a Release engineering workshop as part of Usenix Federated Conferences week, on June 20, 2014, in Philadelphia, PA.  The CFP has closed, but I think you can still register.

The Releng 2014 workshop is April 11, at Google in Mountain View.  We were really overwhelmed by the number of people were interested in registering for this workshop, and the event is now sold out.  A few of the talks will be recorded, so if you couldn't get a ticket, they will be available online after the event. 

Finally, there's the first IEEE Special Issue on Release Engineering.   The deadline for submission of a paper is August 1, 2014.  Not an event, but a great place to get a paper on your area of expertise published.

Any other events I missed?

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Releng 2014 CFP now open

Last year I was on the organizing committee for a one day workshop on release engineering in San Francisco as part of ICSE.  We had so much positive feedback that we have organized another one this year.  This year's workshop will be held on April 11, at Google in Mountain View, California.  If you are interested in submitting a talk or paper, the deadline for the CFP is February 28.  More details on the website. 

Here's what people liked about last year's workshop

"Brought release engineers together in the same room! So awesome. Great talks and interaction between researchers and practitioners."


"The information sharing and the candidness of the speakers with their organizational challenges."


"Overall, I loved this opportunity and you all did a wonderful job putting this on. THANK YOU!"

"Specific stories of how some companies improved their release engineering. Being able to network and ask questions of presenters and people working on the same problem domain."

"The huge variation in scale that things are being done across the industry. "

"Informal structure led to lots of hallway conversations"

Image ©stuckincustoms, http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/351212669/sizes/m/under Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0 This picture of the international airport in Bangkok has nothing to do with release engineering, but has interesting architecture.

As was the case last year, there will be both release engineers and researchers in attendance.  This should generate a lot of interesting discussions as we talk about how we have succeeded and failed in building, deploying and testing software often at a large scale and what further research is needed. But if you work at a small company too we would love to hear your stories too.  One note of feedback that we received last year was that people would like to hear from a variety of companies, not just large ones.


In parallel to the workshop, a call will be launched for the first ever IEEE Software Special Issue on Release Engineering.  So submit a talk or paper, polish it with feedback from the workshop, and submit it to the special issue for possible publication.

I'm happy to help if you have any questions regarding the submission process or the workshop in general. Please feel free to drop me a line (I'm kmoir and I work at mozilla dot com).


More information regarding from last year's workshop:


Release Engineering as a Force Multiplier - John O'Duinn 
Releng 2013 recap - Kim Moir

As an aside, there is another release engineering event as part of Usenix on June 20 in Philadelphia with an open CFP too.   As Dinah McNutt, the organizer of this event remarked to me "It's going to be a great year to be a release engineer".

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Lessons learned organizing a technical event

I was on the organizing committee for Releng 2013.  This was the first time I've been involved in organizing a technical event.  I thought my experiences might be useful to others in the same situation thus this blog entry:-)

Reaching out to potential speakers
Three of the people on our organizing committee were researchers.  I was the only release engineer.  My goal was to get as many release engineers as possible to submit talks and attend the workshop.  I asked for suggestions from my coworkers and LinkedIn contacts to try to reach people that might be interested in submitting a talk.  I also wrote to multiple release engineering oriented mailing lists and Google+ groups.  I had a query for #relengcon and @relengcon mentions on Twitter.  If people mentioned that the relengcon sounded interesting, I replied to them and suggested that they submit a talk.  I also posted information about the workshop on several release engineering LinkedIn and meetup.com groups.  It's often a good idea to contact the organizer of a group and ask them to send text crafted by the organizers to their members.  Receiving a message from someone they already know lends some validity to the message, versus just another person adding to their inbox noise.

Carl and Gareth from Netflix talk about self-service build and delivery

Academic vs. Industry
Releng 2013 was a workshop under the larger ICSE academic conference.   The submission process was much more formal than the industry conferences I've attended in the past.   There were two types of submissions: a formal paper or an abstract for a talk.  There were strict submission guidelines with respect to the format of the talk abstract.  In contrast, the submission process for most industry conferences seems to be "submit a paragraph summarizing your talk into a form on web page".  Very easy.  The different approach stems from the fact that proceedings from academic conferences are usually published.  Academics often need the promise of publication to secure funding to attend a conference.  

Funding
This workshop had effectively zero budget.  ICSE workshops don't get any funding from the fees paid to the larger ISCE conference.   Attendees had to pay registration fees to attend the workshop whether they had a talk accepted or not.  Many industry conferences offer a reduced registration fee for speakers.  Since this was a first time event, I really concentrated on encouraging people to submit talks and register for the event.  Now that the event was a success, I would feel comfortable approaching a company and asking them to sponsor it so we could reduce speaker fees.  We had some funding from a research institution for one of our keynote speakers.  I reached out to Mozilla developer relations who provided some t-shirts,  mugs and stickers.  In the future, I'd also reach out to other companies for swag donations :-)

Recording of sessions
The cost of hiring a company to record the talks was prohibitive given our lack of budget.  Again, now that the first workshop was a success, this could be another item that could be sponsored. 

Post-workshop dinner organization
The OpenTable website is a great resource to see the availability of seating at  of various restaurants in several US cities.  It also links to their respective ratings.  This was easy way to make reservations at restaurants for dinner, especially since none of the organizers live in the Bay area.

Image ©photographus, http://www.flickr.com/photos/misspixels/8480711076/in/photostream/ under Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

 
Panel
I had never moderated a panel before.  I found this article was quite helpful on how to successfully moderate a panel.  I spent quite a bit of time before the event thinking of panel questions and we also sought input from our attendees in a survey.   As for participants on the panel, I reached out to release engineers who didn't present a talk but looked like they had a wealth of release engineering experience on their LinkedIn profiles.  Sometimes diversity is just asking different people!

Speaker gifts
We wanted to give speaker gifts to our fine keynote speakers.  I was unsure what a typical speaker gift comprised so I asked on Twitter.   The answers ranged from fancy pens, laptop bags, local bottles of wine and local cookbook.  Another person suggested that the gift be something carried on the plane if the speaker wasn't local.  In fact, they usually personalized the gift by presenter and shipped it to their home to avoid dealing with airline hassles regarding gifts.  Release engineering is about building things.  Bram suggested Lego as a speaker gift.  I liked this idea a lot and added it as one of the items in the speaker gift bag.

In the end the workshop went pretty well.  The most important thing was to get people who are passionate about release engineering in the same room.  And that's where the interesting conversations begin and you make connections with people.  That's what really matters in the end.  

If you've been involved in organizing a technical event what advice do you have?

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Releng 2013 Recap

On May 20, we held the Releng 2013 workshop in San Francisco.  By all accounts it was a success!  I was unsure what to expect given that this was a first time for this workshop.   It seemed to be a topic that generated a lot of interest.  We had around 80 attendees which to my understanding was the highest attendance of any workshop at ICSE this year.   It was great to have so many people interested in release engineering and research in the room.  It was also fantastic to meet my co-organizers Bram, Foutse and Christian in person after working to organize this event since last fall.

The night before the workshop, I went out to dinner with the other organizers and some of their professor and post-doc colleagues.  I was struck by how enthusiastic they were about release engineering topics and interacting with industry.  One of them said  "We want to make sure that we're working on relevant problems." 

There were two keynotes at the workshop.  The opening keynote was Release Engineering as Force Multiplier by John O'Duinn of Mozilla.  The afternoon one was by Roman Scheiter of LinkedIn and entitled Against All Odds – Completely Overhauling Linkedin's Release Process.  Both were fantastic accounts of how the build, test and release pipelines at these companies were improved to make the organizations as a whole more effective.  It was an interesting contrast in that LinkedIn
moved from branch based development model to trunk based continuous integration while Mozilla moved from trunk based continuous integration to branch based development model.

One of the researchers commented that if you have negative results, you don't publish a paper.  So they were somewhat surprised to see the openness from those from industry on the things we did wrong.  My understanding is that's not that common in academia given the push to be the first to publish a new result.  A different culture.

Some highlights for me from the other talks:

• The software delivery model at Netflix by Curt Patrick and Gareth Bowles (development islands, no release engineers, their team provides tooling for self-serve builds)
• Hal Wine from Mozilla on using Hg and Git on the same codebase (many asked why - that sounds crazy!)
• Jim Buffenbarger from Boise State University gave a talk on amake which includes automatic dependency processing
• Akos Frohner and Boris Debic from Google gave a talk about the continuous release process at Google and which included some incredible numbers (100 million unit tests run a day!).  Boris also had some great things to say about the value of release engineering such as  "Release engineering should taught in business school, not in computer science classes.  It has real business value, and developers can learn it later. " "Startups should hire release enginners early, otherwise they will have to drain the swamp later".  "Companies that don't do release engineering well don't compete well in the marketplace."  Definitely words of wisdom.
• Dustin Mitchell from Mozilla gave a talk on the Buildbot continuous integration framework.  Later that afternoon, Moses Mendoza and Matthaus Owens from Puppet Labs presented how they build their packages for their consumers  and mentioned that they hoped to collaborate with Dustin and learn more about Buildbot.  Which was great - so glad that the workshop encouraged this collaboration.
• Ryan Hardt, a post-doc from University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee) gave a talk about Formiga, an Eclipse plug-in for refactoring Ant code which looks very promising. 
• Peter Rigby  from Concordia University described  DCVS systems facilitate different workflows between developers as opposed to more centralized systems.  Very interesting!

At the end of the day, I had the honour of moderating the discussion panel. The panel started out with professors Mike Godrey from Waterloo and Gunther Ruhe from the university of Calgary, as well as practitioners Jason Newblanc from Salesforce and Curt Patrick from Netflix.  Discussions included what topics needed more research (dependency analysis), to  a discussion of the skills do you look for when hiring a good release engineer (communication skills above all).  Given that one of the main goals of the workshop was to bring together researchers and release engineers it was very gratifying to hear from the researchers on the panel how happy they were that they had the opportunity to learn from the presentations earlier in the day.  After a while the panel shifted to include new members with new topics, and then we wrapped up to head to post-workshop dinners where the discussions continued.

Several attendees mentioned to me that they were happy to attend the workshop because it validated the release engineering work that they do is important.   I'm very fortunate to work at Mozilla on a large release engineering team where there are many people who love to talk about build optimization and automation.  But many release engineers work in organizations where they are the only ones who are interested in this subject.   To bring all these people together was a great experience!

We would like to thank everyone who attended the workshop.  Thank you to our session chairs who timed the talks and ensure that we stayed on schedule.   Thank you to Juliana Saraiva, our student volunteer, who helped with setup and throughout the day with audio and visual issues. 
A special thanks to all of our speakers.  Having been a speaker in the past, I understand all the work that goes into preparing talks on top of your regular day jobs and truly appreciate the effort that made this workshop successful.  At the end of the day, there was a resounding show of hands from attendees that they would like to attend another workshop.  In fact, several companies volunteered to  their space to host events which is very generous.   Please follow @relengcon on twitter for more information on upcoming events.  Many of the papers and presentations are available on the web site.  If your slides are missing from the web site, please email them to Bram.

Also thank you to my colleagues at Mozilla for arranging our releng work week to be same week so many of us could attend, despite it being a Canadian holiday weekend.  You're all amazing :-)

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Releng 2013 keynotes: John O'Duinn (Mozilla) and Roman Scheiter (LinkedIn)

There are two exciting keynotes planned for Releng 2013

John O'Duinn, Director of Release Engineering at Mozilla will kick off the workshop with his keynote Release Engineering as a Force Multiplier.  The build and release process used to be a pain point at Mozilla, but now makes the company and community more productive as a whole.  John will describe how the team added support for project branches to allow concurrent development, rethought continuous integration and increased capacity by moving to a hybrid-cloud build infrastructure. These changes improved several aspects of the business, including switching to a rapid release model and reducing turnaround time on a release from weeks to hours.  As a result,  Mozilla improved its abilities against much bigger and better funded competitors in the marketplace while also allowing them to enter new markets and help ensure its long-term success.


Roman Scheiter, Engineering Services Director at LinkedIn, will present the afternoon keynote entitled Against All Odds – Completely Overhauling Linkedin's Release Process.  This session will cover the evolution of LinkedIn’s release process from its earliest days to the point where the rapidly growing engineering team necessitated a radical shift. This shift, an executive sponsored effort to address technical debt and introduce new thinking to boost engineering efficiency allows six hundred developers to release thousands of changes per week without compromising quality.  As part of this undertaking, LinkedIn learned many best practices, developed tools and custom infrastructure, and lived through the internal cultural changes needed to make this independent release process work.   Roman will detail the evolution and results of this shift so you can learn directly from LinkedIn's pain.

 

In addition to these fantastic keynotes, we also have talks from release engineers and researchers from Netflix, Google,  Microsoft, Gnome, Red Hat, IBM, several universities and more!  We'll also have a panel at the end of the day to discuss the future of release engineering.

Check out the full program on the Releng 2013 site.  To register for the conference, which is managed as part of the larger ICSE conference, you can follow this link and choose the one-day-workshop.  See you in San Francisco on May 20!

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Who's speaking at Releng 2013?

Release engineering helps bring many of the products we use every day to market.  From entertainment, such as Netflix

http://www.flickr.com/photos/myetvmedia/8478881935/sizes/o/in/set-72157632783339196/

to search,

to operating systems and tooling,

to browsers and mobile operating systems that unleash the power of the web,

to software to configure the thousands of servers that allow us to build these products, and serve them to our customers.

Release engineers and researchers from Netflix, Puppet Labs, Mozilla. IBM, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Gnome and several universities will be giving talks at the Releng 2013 workshop on May 20, 2013 in San Francisco. I'm really excited by the different viewpoints that these speakers will bring to the conference and look forward to some interesting conversations.  I always enjoy learning about complex systems work and I'm sure that a behind-the-scenes look at how these companies build, test and deploy software will be fascinating.  A detailed list of talks is available on the conference web site.

In addition to the talks, we have two fantastic keynote speakers

John O'Duinn from Mozilla:  Release Engineering as a "force-multiplier
Alan Grosskurth a release engineering consultant (formally VMWare):
Release Engineering in the Cloud Era

To register for the conference, which is managed as part of the larger ICSE conference, you can follow this link and choose the one-day-workshop. We look forward to seeing you there!

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