Developer experience (DevEx) is all about removing friction from the CI/CD or DevOps software delivery process. This track looks at tools and best practices for delivering quality code at speed, while also ensuring a smooth developer flow -- even when things go wrong, which they inevitably will. Join us to hear stories that are both real world and aspirational, and that are about how the best teams have combined innovations in technology, process, and culture to keep developers happy while shipping code and delivering value to the business.
Track: DevOps & DevEx: Remove Friction, Ship Code, Add Value
Location: Mountbatten, 6th flr.
Day of week: Tuesday

Track Host: Tracy Miranda
Tracy Miranda is director of open source community at CloudBees, where she works closely with the Jenkins & Jenkins X communities. A developer and open source veteran, Tracy is on the board of directors for the Eclipse Foundation. Tracy has a background in electronics system design and holds patents for her work on processor architectures. She writes for JAXenter.com and Opensource.com on tech, open source, and diversity.
10:35am - 11:25am
Progressive Delivery
An introduction to Progressive Delivery: a basket of skills and technologies for modern software development, testing and deployment: including canarying, Feature Flags, Blue Green deployments and A/B testing at scale. We're seeing advances in approaches to application and service delivery, where deploying a service no longer means releasing it. How can we safely debug in production? Technologies like Kubernetes and Istio bring new management challenges, but also opportunities – service mesh approaches can enable a lot more sophistication in routing of new application functions to particular user communities, managing and mitigating the blast ratio of a service. CI/CD is the basis of everything good in modern software development but there are some new aspects and practices that we don’t currently have a name for. This talk will includes lessons from Microsoft, Cloudflare, Sumo Logic and Target.
11:50am - 12:40pm
Cloud Native CI/CD with Jenkins X and Knative Pipelines
More and more teams are deploying cloud native applications on kubernetes, placing new demands on engineers who want to deploy and test easily during their development workflow. Traditional CI/CD systems haven’t been designed for cloud native environments and need to evolve. Jenkins X is a cloud native CI/CD platform that has done just that, integrating tools in the kubernetes ecosystem into an opinionated system for CI/CD as code.
In this talk we’ll explain the CI/CD challenges in a cloud native landscape, and show how Jenkins X rises to them by leveraging open source cloud native technologies like Knative Pipelines. We’ll demo a GitOps based Jenkins X workflow, showing how simple Jenkins X makes it for developers to stage and deploy changes on demand.
James Rawlings, Co-Creator of Jenkins X & Coder @CloudBees
1:40pm - 2:30pm
Who Broke Prod? - Growing Teams Who Can Fail Without Fear
In a world where we can deploy software and infrastructure changes within seconds, it’s reasonably easy to break stuff. When the inevitable bad stuff happens, humans tend to look for someone to blame. Research has shown that the most productive teams are those who don’t have to fear blame. On high-performing teams, people feel safe taking risks, making mistakes, and learning from them – so how do you build an environment where it’s OK to fail? In this talk we’ll explore the factors that contribute to psychological safety on a delivery team. We’ll look at some of the steps that leaders and team members can take to foster a culture of blameless failure that encourages innovation and collaboration. We’ll look at soft-skills, CI/CD practices, retrospective processes and tooling that can help you to build a culture of trust and ownership within your own team.
4:10pm - 5:00pm
Develop Hundreds of Kubernetes Services at Scale With Airbnb
You've already made the plunge to move to Kubernetes, and you feel pretty good about that. But why does it feel like it requires expert-level Kubernetes knowledge for engineers to get anything done?
This talk will identify key problems that make out-of-the-box Kubernetes less friendly to developers, and strategies for addressing them, based on Airbnb’s experience empowering one thousand engineers to develop hundreds of Kubernetes services at scale. This talk will focus primarily on four problem areas:
- Configuration: abstracting away kubernetse configration, generated services
- Lifecycle: Versioning and refactoring configuration
- Tooling: Creating and distributing opinionated kubectl and plugins
- CI/CD: build and deploy process, and validating configuration
5:25pm - 6:15pm
How to Tell Your Boss Story Points Are a Terrible Metric
By setting the wrong targets your boss can set your team up for failure and a lot of long, late nights or early mornings.
Metrics and targets in software engineering are designed to assist in the measurement of progress usually against a chargeable contract. But, the measures and metrics in each layer of a software organisation are different and the metrics at the interface between each layer can be misunderstood.
When a measure becomes an agreed metric, care needs to be taken that it doesn’t inadvertently become a target, which can result in unnatural behaviour, creating a myriad of unforeseen problems, because incentives are not aligned with the desired outcome.
This talk will look at the different measures commonly found in software development, what they’re used for, highlight the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of measuring progress versus productivity and how all metrics should ultimately relate to a desired business outcome.
Measurements are critical for ensuring that the development addresses the business problem is was designed to solve. We’ll share stories of what happened when the wrong thing got measured and offer some practical ways to help you, your team and of course your boss!
Chris Wilkinson, Software Development Lead @Capgemini
Last Year's Tracks
Monday, 2 March
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Next Generation Microservices: Building Distributed Systems the Right Way
Microservice-based applications are everywhere, but well-built distributed systems are not so common. Early adopters of microservices share their insights on how to design systems the right way.
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Streaming Data Architectures
Today's systems process huge volumes of continuously changing data. Hear how the innovators in this space are designing systems and leveraging modern data stream processing platforms.
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Driving Full Cycle Engineering Teams at Every Level
"Full cycle developers" is not just another catch phrase; it's about engineers taking ownership and delivering value, and doing so with the support of their entire organisation. Learn more from the pioneers.
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When Things Go Wrong: GDPR, Ethics, & Politics
Privacy, confidentiality, safety and security: learning from the frontlines, from both good and bad experiences
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JavaScript: Pushing the Client Beyond the Browser
JavaScript is not just the language of the web. Join this track to learn how the innovators are pushing the boundaries of this classic language and ecosystem
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Modern CS in the Real World
Head back to academia to solve today's problems in software engineering.
Tuesday, 3 March
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Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Hard-earned lessons from the names you know on scalability, reliability, security, and performance.
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The Future of the API: REST, gRPC, GraphQL and More
The humble web-based API is evolving. This track provides the what, how, and why of future APIs.
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Building High Performing Teams
There are many discussions outlining the secret sauce of high-performing teams. Learn how to balance the essential ingredients of high performing teams such as trust and delegation, as well as recognising the pitfalls and problems that will ruin any recipe.
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Machine Learning: The Latest Innovations
AI and machine learning is more approachable than ever. Discover how ML, deep learning, and other modern approaches are being used in practice.
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Bare Knuckle Performance
Crushing latency and getting the most out of your hardware.
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Modern Compilation Targets
Learn about the innovation happening in the compilation target space. WebAssembly is only the tip of the iceberg.
Wednesday, 4 March
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Growing Unicorns in the EU: Building, Leading and Scaling Financial Tech Start Ups
Learn how EU FinTech innovators have designed, built, and led both their technologies and organisations.
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Kubernetes and Cloud Architectures
Learn about cloud native architectural approaches from the leading industry experts who have operated Kubernetes and FaaS at scale, and explore the associated modern DevOps practices.
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Chaos and Resilience: Architecting for Success
Making systems resilient involves people and tech. Learn about strategies being used, from cognitive systems engineering to chaos engineering.
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Leading Distributed Teams
Remote and distributed working are increasing in popularity, but many organisations underestimate the leadership challenges. Learn from those who are doing this effectively.
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Scaling Security, from Device to Cloud
Implementing effective security is vitally important, regardless of where you are deploying software applications
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Evolving Java
JVM futures, JIT directions and improvements to the runtimes stack is the theme of this year’s JVM track.