THANK YOU to our sponsors: ProKarma and Agile Open Northwest!!

For any code base there comes a time when you want (or need) to change it. If your changes are extensive, it’s easy to get lost in a jungle of dependencies or on a sea of broken code. Ultimately, you might just give up and shove it away under the legacy label. Instead of doing that, use "The Mikado Method," a systematic approach to reclaim your code. The method helps you visualize, prepare, and perform business-value focused changes, while delivering, and without having a broken code-base in the process. It enhances team communication, collaboration and learning, and helps individuals stay on track.

http://mikadomethod.wordpress.com/book/

For: Lead developers, architects, programming coaches, or anyone who wants to get some serious hands-on practice on how to work their way out of messy code while keeping the delivery frequency and business value focus.

Join Ola Ellnestam, founder of Agical.se and author of The Mikado Method, as he leads the group through exploring techniques for restructuring difficult-t0-work-with code. Ola likes to combine people, technology and business which is best done with simple means and flexible processes. More than that he likes to share his knowledge and experiences because that’s how new insights are created according to him. http://ellnestam.wordpress.com/

http://www.hanoulle.be/2012/02/who-is-ola-ellnestam/

http://www.agical.com/

Registration fee: $85 - The participation of our sponsors, (including Agile Open Northwest, ProKarma, and...you?) helps us to keep the fee as low as possible.

For more information, or if you'd like to sponsor this event, contact dlarsen [at] futureworksconsulting [dot] com

This Chef Introductory Workshop is a hands on training class for getting familiar with Chef for performing common automation tasks. In this workshop, we will cover:

• Set up a local workstation with Chef and connect to a Chef Server.

• Use Chef to automate installation of a Nagios server as a real world example.

• Automate other common system tasks with Chef, including: User management and sudo permissions NTP, including a local NTP server SMTP relaying with postfix

Each exercise will be instructor-led, and introduce new Chef concepts along the way. We'll cover the Anatomy of a Chef Run, Chef's Authentication Cycle, how to build roles, manipulate configuration through data in attributes, use Chef's search API for dynamic configuration, and more.

For more information and to register please go to http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5091368420.

Agile Open Northwest, a non-profit alliance of agile practitioners in the US Pacific Northwest region, presents our seventh annual conference, now expanded to a third day! This conference contains over 90 sessions bringing novices, journeymen, and experts together for face-to-face conversations exploring the most important topics in Agile software development today.

What: An Open Space conference about Agile practices and techniques. Where: Ambridge Event Center, Portland, Oregon When: February 6 to 8, 2013 - Now three days long! Who: YOU and other experienced, collaborative, committed agile practitioners. Registration is limited to 150 participants. Cost: $200 for the three-day event, including continental breakfast and lunch each day, and dinner on the first night.

Agile Open Northwest 2013 offers an opportunity to strengthen our community of practice and co-create the future for Agile development in our region. For three days, we build on conversation after conversation as we engage important questions like:

What is Agile really? What are the most important practices in making Agile approaches really successful on my team? Who practices Agile philosophies, methods, principles or practices in the Northwest, and what's the impact? What is the difference between Lean, Scrum, XP, and other Agile approaches? What new technical challenges face Agile? What are the latest cutting edge developments in the Agile software development world? How do Agile frameworks and methods co-exist with project management, process control and other governance structures? How do we adapt Agile practices to our organizations without diluting them? Can Agile methods work in big, risky projects? How? When distributed teams use Agile approaches, what changes? If we adopt an Agile mindset, what might the transition look like in my organization?

We're skipping January this time due to travel schedules not aligning, but will be back February 22nd with an awesome meetup! 

Ever wish you had a Chef sitting next to you so you can ask that burning question? 

Perhaps you've been banging your head against a wall on something technical and wish a Chef was sitting next to you to help?

Have you wished you had a Chef's ear to express how much you love, or maybe don't love, using Chef?

Maybe you're new to Chef and config management and want to bounce some questions or ideas off of people who do this stuff for a living?

Well, now you can! This time we're bringing in a panel of Chefs for Q&A / AMA (Ask Me Anything) and then we'll break out and help you work through any issues you may be experiencing with Chef products, recipes, pipelines, and even DevOps transformation. So start thinking about questions you'd like answered or things you'd like to discuss or work on and bring it on! We're here to help you and make you successful!

This is a great opportunity to meet some Chefs from different areas within Chef and get answers and help! Join us!

Chef Panel

Irving Popovetsky - Principal Customer Architect

Daniel Martushev - Field Solutions Architect

George Miranda - Director of Product Marketing

Eric Maxwell - Success Engineer

Morgan Drake - Inside Solutions Architect 

Tim Smith - Community Engineer

Kaivalya Hanswadkar - Director, UX Design

MORE TBA

Food / Drink

As usual, pizza (gf & vegan options too!), beer, cider, and non-alcoholic beverages will be provided. 

Join us for our monthly gathering to discuss everything from incident response to cross-team collaboration to automation frameworks. Food provided. Please RSVP!

This month: LIGHTNING TALKS!

DevOps Preppers

Sure, the odds of you meeting your demise from a zombie bite are pretty much zero, but pretending it could happen isn’t completely worthless. This talk will walk through how a prepper thinks, how that mindset can be extended via the Incident Command System, and how you can use iICS for non-zombie-based risks.

Tiffany Longworth is a Site Reliability Engineer at Puppet. She has launched successful projects large and small, but has also worked on projects that were spectacular failures! She likes using her background as a Marine, her training as an English teacher, automation, and cat gifs as much as possible.

So you want to switch to microservices?

The hype cycle around microservices often glosses over the real challenges that engineering teams face when trying to migrate away from monolithic applications. In this talk, we'll discuss code architectures and strategies that can help guide your codebase's transition from mono to micro.

Matt Greensmith is the Operations Engineering Manager at Cozy, where's he's responsible for a lot of nouns that end in "ity," like reliability, observability and security. In a past life he was simultaneously a call center rep, a bingo caller and a wedding DJ, so you know he likes to talk.

A Brief History of Schedulers

What do schedulers do for us, how has that changed over time, and why should we care? We'll discuss the historical context that gave rise to early schedulers, and take a look at the state of such tools today.

Kate has been in software engineering for almost a decade, having worked in areas ranging from power grid resiliency to fintech to enterprise software. Kate has managed a variety of teams across the devops spectrum at New Relic and Simple, and is now at HashiCorp helping build tools for other companies and teams to manage their own infrastructure.

What DevOps can teach you about starting a business (and why spreadsheets are everything)

I went from devops to starting a magazine and was happy and dismayed that many of the same skills apply to both. What happens when you don’t have time for structuring databases, building a custom front-end, or maintaining any real code? Well, there’s a lot you can do with a spreadsheet.

Audrey Eschright is a writer, community organizer, and software developer based in Portland, OR. She's the publisher of The Recompiler, a feminist technology magazine. Previously she founded Calagator, an open source community calendaring service which has been actively used in the Portland tech community for ten years as of this month. Her work on community safety and codes of conduct is used by user groups and open source projects around the world.

Pair Programming/Problem Solving

Pair programming is a practice a lot of engineers know about, few profess to enjoy and everyone has an opinion about. Let’s take a look at how to use it regardless of your role and leverage it to shift our perception of effective problem solving.

Logan Davis is a software developer. He’s shipped a lot of code and some of it was pretty good. He believes in fostering an inclusive culture focused on solving problems in a healthy way. Logan currently is a software engineer at InComm Digital Solutions.

*****

Risky Business

As we operate production systems they inevitably fail. As they fail and fail and fail again we as operators start to identify the way they fail and we know the causes of the failures. What if we could see the future and predict failures before they happen. We're going to explore using techniques to identify risks and how to present the risks to engineering and business stakeholders.

Jesse Dearing enjoys spending time with his family, bicycling, and working on small projects around the house and in Open Source. During working

Presentation and discussions about Chef at the Workday office in Beaverton.

Food and beverages will served.

Agenda:

6pm-6:30pm Arrive and mingle - Enjoy food and beverages

6:30pm-7pm "Reducing Cost & Risk via Automation with Terraform on AWS" presented by Chris Dunlap- Sr. Solution Engineer @ HashiCorp

Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. This talk will focus on how customers can leverage Terraform to eliminate unnecessary cloud spend by 30-40% and reduce risk by baking guardrails and best practices into their automation.

7pm-7:30pm "Intelligent decisions about cloud usage with Cloudability’s FinOps platform" presented by Patrick Zumar- Senior SE @ Cloudability

A new operating model for the cloud, called FinOps, is emerging that enables a shift — a combination of systems, best practices and culture — to increase an organization’s ability to understand cloud costs and make tradeoffs. In the same way that DevOps revolutionized development by breaking down silos and increasing agility, FinOps increases the business value of cloud by bringing together technology, business and finance professionals with a new set of processes.

FinOps has several fundamental building blocks we’ve seen high performing organizations put in place to gain competitive advantage. Patrick Zumar will share what we’ve learned from guiding hundreds of large and small cloud adopters on their journey to adopt FinOps.

7:30pm-8pm Networking

Come join us for the kick-off of Dynamic Talks in Portland!

Dynamic Talks is an ongoing meetup series featuring technical talks from some of the leading experts in tech in major cities around the US. Enjoy talks about the most innovative subjects in: AI, ML, voice platforms, the Cloud and search. Every event is free, with complimentary food and drinks.

In Portland, the topic of our first event will be “Voice Platforms, Conversational Commerce and NLU”. The speakers for this event will be Victoria Livschitz, Founder and CTO of Grid Dynamics, and Eugene Steinberg, Technical Fellow at Grid Dynamics. Come enjoy a night of technical talks and networking opportunities at CoLab Coworking Portland in Tigard. We hope to see you there!

Agenda

[6:00PM - 6:30PM]: Guests arrive, pizza and drinks are served

[6:30PM - 7:15PM]: First talk will be presented by Victoria Livschitz on “Conversational commerce: emerging architectures for smart & useful chatbots", followed by a Q&A

[7:15PM - 7:30PM]: Networking break

[7:30PM - 8:15PM]: Second talk will be presented by Eugene Steinberg on "Not your fathers search engine: deep learning applications for e-commerce search", followed by a Q&A

[8:15PM] - 9:00PM]: More networking and the event ends

Talk details:

Victoria Livschitz's talk details:

Title: "Conversational commerce: emerging architectures for smart & useful chatbots"

Abstract: Smart speakers and messaging apps are increasing in popularity due to their convenience, intuitive usage, and new user experiences. Companies are racing to develop voice interfaces and AI technologies in order to utilize smart speakers and messaging platforms as a sales channel.

We are introducing Grid Genie, a completely open source, multi-device, conversational commerce platform. With this technology, we can help you engineer a powerful platform to combine your Alexa skills, Google actions, and Facebook Messenger into a single seamless experience.

Eugene Steinberg's talk details:

Title: "Not your fathers search engine: deep learning applications for e-commerce search"

Abstract: In this talk, we will discuss how recent advancements in artificial intelligence are transforming traditional search technologies. Deep learning-based image analysis and natural language processing open exciting new horizons for search and recommendation applications across the industries. We’ll talk about how deep learning models can help conventional search engines to achieve better relevance. We will share our experience implementing innovative solutions for online retailers, finance and high tech customers.