The document provides an agenda for the Culture track at PuppetConf, which will take place from 19-21 October in San Diego. It includes descriptions of 8 sessions that will cover topics like scaling Puppet at large organizations, the future direction of the Puppet platform, managing large Puppet installations, and giving back to open source communities from within large companies. Brief biographies are provided for 10 speakers who will present on these topics, such as engineers from GitHub, Puppet, Twitter, Google, and Wells Fargo. The document encourages attendees to register for the full conference.

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Track Overview:
Culture
19 - 21 October
San Diego

2. Scaling Puppet and Puppet
Culture at GitHub
GitHub's Puppet code base dates back to 2008 with over 250,000
lines of code, more than 60,000 commits, and over 200 committers.
At GitHub, Puppet contributions come not only from infrastructure
engineers, but also developers, database administrators, security
administrators, and others for whom Puppet is not a primary skill.
As the business has grown and staffing has increased, it has
become even more important to have a rock-solid Puppet code
base and deployment mechanism. The first part of this session will
cover technical approaches to improve reliability including CI,
developer tools, and integrations. The second part will describe
cultural considerations including training, process, ChatOps, and
code reviews to ensure best practices and avoid an "only ops writes
Puppet" mentality.
2
Thursday, October 20 | 11:15 am
Culture
Senior Infrastructure Engineer, GitHub
Kevin Paulisse

3. A Roadmap for a Platform: Mixing
Metaphors for Fun and Profit
These days, Puppet is more than a single program: it's a
platform. From the new language features to the testing
ecosystem to its HTTP APIs, there's more ecosystem activity
than ever before. But where's it headed? What's coming
around the next bend in the road...map? In this high-level,
low-flying discussion, Eric will paint a picture of the blueprint
for the platform's future. Beware: mixed metaphors and
dadjokes ahead.
3
Thursday, October 20 | 1:30 pm
Eric Sorenson
Culture
Senior Technical Product Manager, Puppet

4. Can You Manage Me Now?
Humanizing Configuration
Management at Scale
Managing a large Puppet installation is not historically
easy. This is not likely to be better at the scale of tens of
thousands of servers, and roughly one hundred active
contributors. It's even harder when the existing code base
is full of booby traps and time bombs, and has the
reputation of a mob boss. This talk will explore how the
Core Infrastructure team at Twitter managed (and
manages) the following types of scenarios (and more): * A
several-year-old, mixed 2.x and 3.x codebase with over
100,000 commits. * A version control migration. * Massive
cultural FUD (and occasional propaganda) about Puppet.
4
Thursday, October 20 | 2:30 pm
Tray Torrance
Culture
Site Reliability Engineer, Twitter

5. Kubernetes for Sysadmins –
Kelsey Hightower, Google
Kubernetes is an open source system for automating
deployment, operations, and scaling of containerized
applications. But, Kubernetes' true power lies in the APIs and
abstractions it exposes for building deep integration with
infrastructure tools such as Puppet, Nginx, and the Let's
Encrypt project. This session will take attendees through a
set of live demos and code walkthroughs that demonstrate
how to build automation tools on top of the Kubernetes API
and leverage the Puppet DSL to manage Kubernetes
resources.
5
Thursday, October 20 | 3:45 pm
Kelsey Hightower
Culture
Staff Developer Advocate, Google

6. Avoiding Toxic Technical Debt
Derivatives
This talk is about failure. Technical debt is an apt description
for the accrued bubblegum and duct tape hacks, manual
changes and processes which exist only in oral histories. If
it's not automated, it's probably technical debt, and even
then... In this talk we'll use an open source project's
infrastructure as a cautionary tale. Taking a tour of some of
the biggest automation failures, we'll highlight major gaps
and laugh at how the bubble eventually burst. With technical
debt, you can't ever declare bankruptcy or get bailed out. Are
you sure about that manual change you just made?
6
Thursday, October 20 | 4:45 pm
R Tyler Croy
Culture
Person, CloudBees, Inc.

7. Friday, October 21 | 1:30 pm
J. Paul Reed
A Look at Looking in the Mirror:
Actionable Retrospectives
Asking "how can failure be avoided?" isn't as useful or relevant as
focusing on "how does our organization react to failure?" and "how do
we create a sustainable, actionable process for describing, exploring,
and learning from failure?" We'll examine the current thinking on
organizational and technological failure and look at tools and
techniques used by other industries (transportation, construction,
manufacturing) to conduct their postmortems. We'll also look at
cognitive biases that often find their way into a postmortem process
and why it's important to be aware of them. We'll finish with an
overview of techniques to conduct postmortems, both from a
process/skill perspective and from a tooling perspective, to help
ensure that the results of your postmortems are incorporated back into
the organization's shared knowledge.
7
Culture
Consultant, Release Engineering
Approaches

8. Doing DevOps Where You
Wouldn't Have Expected
The new edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration
was released two weeks ago, 15 years after the first edition. It takes a
DevOps approach outside the classic SDLC world including enterprise
and desktop support environments.
DevOps is not a set of tools, nor is it just automating deployments. It is
a set of principles that improve any complex process. This talk will
present the DevOps principles in terms that apply to all system
administrators, and use case studies to explore their use in
non-developer environments.
8
Friday, October 21 | 1:30 pm
Thomas Limoncelli
Culture
Site Reliability Engineer,
StackOverflow.com
● CAMS
● The Three Ways of DevOps Case Study: A better onboarding process.
● Minimum Viable Product (MVP) strategies
● Case Study: organizing a project to accelerate the delivery of value
● The Small Batches Principle
● Case Study: Failover at StackOverflow

9. Giving Back in a Large Company
It's imperative that your manager allow you to contribute back to an
open source community. Not because it will help you, but because it
will help your company. I hope to share with you how we were able to
realize this at Wells Fargo. I will explain the key factors that were the
tipping point in changing the culture and how we hope to continue to
leverage this approach going forward not only altruistically, but also as
a business imperative.
9
Friday, October 21 | 3:45 pm
Nate Loomis
Culture
IT Manager, Wells Fargo

10. Want to explore more PuppetConf
sessions?
View our full agenda and other tracks at
puppet.com/puppetconf

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Culture:
Speakers
19 - 21 October
San Diego

12. Kevin Paulisse
Senior Infrastructure Engineer, GitHub
Kevin Paulisse joined GitHub as a Senior Infrastructure
Engineer in 2015. He has been a Puppet enthusiast since first
rolling it out in 2011, and has worked as a system
administrator, developer, and everything in between for the last
twenty years or so. Kevin lives near Madison, Wisconsin with
his wife, son, and cat.

13. Eric Sorenson
Senior Technical Product Manager, Puppet
Eric Sorenson has been working in systems administration
since 28.8k modems were exotic luxuries. After running
campus networks, large scale production internet services,
and sysadmin teams, he moved to Portland in 2012 to work
at Puppet as technical product manager for Puppet's core
technology platform. When he's not grooming backlogs or
referring to himself in the third person, he's out exploring
Oregon's trails by foot and bicycle.

14. Tray Torrance
Site Reliability Engineer, Twitter
Tray has been working in systems administration since 2009,
and in that time has been called every possible name the role
can have (including several not suited for reprinting here!).
His interests range from managing complex, distributed
systems, to Operating System development, and all topics in
between. When not basking in the off-white glow of a
monitor, Tray enjoys traveling the world and sampling craft
beer, fine whiskeys and delicious food with his partner,
Mandy.

15. Kelsey Hightower
Staff Developer Advocate, Google
Kelsey has worn every hat possible throughout his career in
tech and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things
happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open
source advocate focused on building simple tools that make
people smile.

16. R Tyler Croy
Person, CloudBees, Inc.
Tyler has been a long-time contributor to the Jenkins project,
professional software engineer and currently works full-time
on the Jenkins project at CloudBees, Inc. As part of his work
for the Jenkins project, he has been responsible for project
infrastructure through numerous service additions, site
outages and total overhauls of the project's infrastructure
management. He also will gladly discuss beer, gardening and
bread recipes with you.

17. J. Paul Reed
Consultant, Release Engineering Approaches
J. Paul Reed has over fifteen years experience in the
trenches as a build/release engineer, working with such
storied companies as VMware, Mozilla, Postbox, Symantec,
and Salesforce. In 2012, he founded Release Engineering
Approaches, a consultancy incorporating a host of tools and
techniques to help organizations "Simply Ship. Every time."
He's worked across a number of industries, from financial
services to cloud-based infrastructure to health care, with
teams ranging from 2 to 2500 on everything from tooling,
operational analysis and improvement, cultural
transformation, and business value optimization. He speaks
internationally on release engineering, DevOps, operational
complexity, and human factors and is currently a Masters of
Science candidate in Human Factors & Systems Safety at
Lund University.

18. Thomas Limoncelli
Site Reliability Engineer, StackOverflow.com
Tom is an SRE at StackOverflow.com and is a co-author of
the new (third edition) The Practice of System and Network
Administration (http://the-sysadmin-book.com). He is an
internationally recognized author, speaker, system
administrator and DevOps advocate. He's also known for
other books such as The Practice of Cloud System
Administration (http://the-cloud-book.com) and Time
Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly). Previously
he's worked at small and large companies including Google,
Bell Labs / Lucent, AT&T. His blog is
http://EverythingSysadmin.com and he tweets
@YesThatTom. He knew Luke before Puppet was a thing.

19. Nate Loomis
IT Manager, WellsFargo
Nate Loomis manages the Automated Configuration
Engineering team at Wells Fargo, which is part of the Private
Cloud organization. He has a passion for DevOps principles
and for supporting positive, healthy ecosystems and
corporate culture. Nate is currently interested in learning
systems that can push automation boundaries and establish
new feedback loops based on patterns and metrics. Prior to
focusing on DevOps for Wells Fargo, Nate was a member of
a team tasked with ensuring Wells Fargo used Free and
Open Source software correctly. He fell in love with
programming at the age of seven and has been tinkering with
technology ever since. Nate lives in Charlotte, NC with his
wife and two kids. He enjoys volunteering in his community
and stepping up to challenges.

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