Category Archives: Podcasts

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

 

Jonny Wooldridge on Enterprises vs Startups – The Goat Farm – S1E3

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In this episode Ross and I talk to Jonny Wooldridge, formerly of Marks & Spencer and currently at The Cambridge Satchel Company. We ask Jonny his thoughts on what DevOps is like in an Enterprise vs a Startup, how to jumpstart adoption, how to handle “legacy systems”, and get his thoughts on concepts such as “Pace Layering” and “Bimodal IT”.

Ross and I also talk about why the language we use is important when talking about DevOps and DevOps concepts.

Download MP3 – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS

Guest Info:

Jonny Wooldridge – LinkedIn – Twitter

Jonny Wooldridge is CTO of The Cambridge Satchel Company and has a history of leading agile cross-functional teams in dynamic and fast paced start-ups in London including lastminute.com, Opodo.com and Photobox.com. Prior to joining The Cambridge Satchel Company he was Head of Web Engineering at the British multinational retailer M&S. He was instrumental in introducing DevOps to the enterprise whilst working on a 3 year / £150 Million project to re-platform the website, order management systems & customer service tools.

He is passionate about Lean and DevOps topics, particularly in challenging environments (like the average enterprise!) and earlier this year started a blog at enterprisedevops.com.

DevOps at Target – The Goat Farm – S1E2

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In this episode of The Goat Farm we talk with Jason Walker and Dan Cundiff of Target Corporation. Jason and Dan have been instrumental in bringing DevOps to Target. Ross and I talk with our guests about the need for DevOps manifestos, the role tooling in DevOps transformations, reward structures in organizations, and hiring for DevOps.

Download MP3 – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS

Guest Info:

Jason Walker – LinkedIn – Twitter

Dan Cundiff – LinkedIn – Twitter

Welcome to the Farm – The Goat Farm – S1E1

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Welcome to the first episode of The Goat Farm. In this episode Ross and I chat about our backgrounds, our thoughts about DevOps, why the world needs another podcast, and DevOps in the Enterprise. If you want to find out how the idea for this podcast came about you can read this post or just listen.

Download MP3  – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS

TL;DL: With The Goat Farm Ross and I hope to expand the content around DevOps in the Enterprise, with the specific focus around real world case studies and successes in the Enterprise.