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Sam Newman's site, a Consultant at ThoughtWorks

Posts from the ‘presentations’ category

New Talk: Designing For Rapid Release

By on January 14, 2012

I’ll be running my new talk “Designing For Rapid Release” at a couple of conferences in the first half of this year. First up is the delightfully named Crash & Burn in Stockholm, on the 2nd of March. Then later in May I’ll be at Poznan in Poland for GeeCon 2012.

This talk focuses on the kinds of constraints we should consider when evolving their architecture of our systems in order to enable rapid, frequent release. So much of the conversation about Continuous Delivery focuses on the design of build pipelines, or the nuts and bolts of CI and infrastructure automation. But often the biggest constraint in being able to incrementally roll out new features are the problems in the design of the system itself. I’ll be pulling together a series of patterns that will help you identify what to look for in your own systems when moving towards Continuous Delivery.

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Upcoming speaking event @ JAX London

By on July 16, 2011

I’ll be speaking on the cloud track at JAX London 2011. The talk “Private Cloud, A Convenient Fiction” attempts to puncture some of the FUD on the subject. The nuances between various hosting solutions are many and varied, and don’t suit being put into neat boxes like ‘public’ and ‘private’. When I talk to clients about what is right to them, the types of things we discuss place different providers on a number of axis, which I hope to get across in this talk.

As always, you can track the conference (or note that you plan to attend) at Simon & Nat’s startup Lanyrd, which is several shades of awesome.

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The talk I did at QCon SF 2009 is now available at infoq. Only an MP3 download is available, otherwise you’ll have to stream it from the site – but you’ll be missing a lot, as the slides are better than hearing me drone on.

March 12, 2010

I’ve been invited to speak on colleague Chris Read’s track at QCon London this March. The track itself is chock full of a number of experienced proffesionals (including two ex-colleagues) so I fully intend to raise my game accordingly. We’re lucky enough to have Michael T. Nygard speaking too, author of perhaps the best book written for software developers in years in the form of Release It!

The track – “Dev and Ops – a Single Team” – attempts to address many of the issues software professionals have in getting their software live. It will cover many aspects, both on the hardcore technical and on the softer people side. Hopefully it will provide lots of useful information you can take back to your own teams.

My talk – From Dev To Production– will be giving an overview of build pipelines, and how they can be used to get the whole delivery team focused on the end objective – shipping quality software as quickly as possible. It draws on some of my recent writing on build patterns, and a wealth of knowledge built up inside ThoughtWorks over the past few years.

My experience of QCon SF last year was excellent – I can thoroughly recommend it to any IT professional involved in shipping software. If you haven’t got your ticket already, go get them now before the prices go up!

February 16, 2010