Monthly Archives: March 2015

Running Internal Events – The Goat Farm – S1E5

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A guy in Belgium inspires a bank in the Netherlands to hold an internal DevOps Days. A weekly newsletter in the UK picks up a presentation from that internal event, and a team in Minneapolis, MN is inspired to hold their own event.

Internal events are becoming more and more popular in Enterprise IT. Cloud Symposiums, Automation Symposiums, DevOps Leadership Summits, and DevOps Days are all internal events I have participated in this year alone. Ross and I talk to Heather Mickman (Target), Brent Nelson (Target), and Mark Heistek (ING Bank) about the events they have run in their organizations, how they got started, what challenges they faced, and any tips for people wanting to run their own events.

If you’d like to see some of the tweets and activities from Target’s last two DevOps events, you can search twitter for the hashtag #dotgt.

We also talk briefly about “The Prince of DevOps“, and reviews we’ve gotten about the podcast (sorry for the heavy breathing last time).

Download MP3 – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS

Guest Info:

Heather Mickman – LinkedIn – Twitter

Heather Mickman is the leader for the API and Integration team at Target and a DevOps enthusiast.  Throughout her career, Heather has continuously embraced hard technology challenges from consulting large Fortune 50 companies on Supply Chain approach, implementing warehouse automation technologies, running large Ops & Support organizations, and establishing enterprise security approaches.  She has a passion for technology, building high performing teams, driving a culture of innovation, and having fun along the way.  Heather lives in Minneapolis with her 2 sons and 2 dachshunds.

Brent Nelson – LinkedIn – Twitter2014-ProfilePic

Husband, father and life-long resident of Minnesota. I’ve been with Target for 26+ years and for the last year have been an internal DevOps collaboration and social media evangelist involved in hosting internal DevOpsDays events, creating/delivering internal educational materials, co-curating the #make_awesome_happen Flipboard ezine and much more.

fotoMarkHeistekMark Heistek – LinkedIn – Twitter

Father of two children, sport fanatic, having fun in life and working at ING Bank Netherlands since 2008. Currently in a continuous delivery team to facilitate in an enterprise continuous delivery pipeline. Furthermore a Continuous Delivery and DevOps evangelist in and outside ING.

Taylorism, Hating Agile, and DevOps at CSG – The Goat Farm – S1E4

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It’s time for another episode of The Goat Farm. On this episode Ross and I talk about: Why do Managers Hate Agile?, Taylorism, hiring and the problems with specialization, and we chat with Scott Prugh about his experiences with DevOps at CSG.

We also touch on the idea of running internal conferences to help spread the word of new technologies within the company, and Ross shares his excitement over the wildly successful DevOps Days at Target. Stay tuned for an upcoming episode where we will talk more about running your own events.

Download MP3 – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS

Guest Info:

Scott Prugh, Chief Architect – Twitter – LinkedIn

Scott is responsible for the overall Platform Architecture and Development in North American Cable. Scott led the architecture teams in developing many of CSG’s next generation assets including Product Configurator and Order Capture.  Scott has been instrumental in leading change at CSG implementing Lean, Agile and DevOps practices.  These changes have resulted in 90% reductions in release impact. Scott is a Lean Practitioner and certified as a Scaled Agile Framework Program Consultant. Previously, Scott was CTO of Telution and built the core runtime and billing architecture for the COMx product suite.

Here is Scott’s talk at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2014