I had the pleasure of speaking at the Kansas City DevOps Meetup in downtown Kansas City! It was kind of like a coming home party. KC DevOps Days is where I got my start at GitLab and set me on a path towards a career I never imagined possible. This event, in the vault of the downtown library was my chance to share GitLab’s story to my local meetup. It was well received and even led to an impromptu demo of the GitLab product!

In the IT Industry, many incidents have been misunderstood or blown out of proportion due to poor handling of communications during and right after a crisis arises. The how, when, and how much communication can be the difference between a media frenzy and an outage that people work through and forget about. Ever since a database outage in January of 2017, companies and contributors have received timely and effective communication from Gitlab.

I gave my Busting Open Source Security Myths talk at DevSecOps Days Denver to a packed out auditorium. If was so well received, I decided to bring it back for Day 2 of SELF 2019!

Developers are constantly being asked to make more and more powerful applications. The more feature-rich the application, though, the more prone to risk it becomes. Many have thought the solution is to keep the code base locked up tight, that open source is undesirable. The truth, however, is quite the opposite! More eyes on code has proven to increase the quality and security of the modern application.

This talk defined the voice of the IT Guy for me. This was the moment when the Sudo Show got its wings, when I realized that I was on the right track towards re-inventing my career. I had people in the room I respected a great deal nodding along in agreement. This was where it REALLY started for me.

So, you are interested in technology, you want to contribute to something bigger than yourself, you can’t wait to join a global community…but where do you start? Is coding the only way in? Let’s take a practical look at how to go from consumer to contributor!

South East Linux Fest 2019 was an amazing test of the IT Guy…not as a brand but as the person I wanted to be in my career. I gave 3 talks in 3 days and spent a lot of time chatting with different folks, sharing stories, answering questions. It challenged my introverted nature and my public speaking skills.

The entire conference was an amazing experience that I will always cherish!

Now more than ever, developers have more tools to pick from than hours in the day. It is so easy to spend more time maintaining the development pipeline than it is actually developing. What if the planning, coding, building, testing, and deployment could all be handled from one tool in one interface? Well it can! Gitlab can cut down on tool chain bloat and decrease cycle times!