Office Hours

Mobile web performance is the topic of the day with Max. Come for a lively discussion on this subject, including:

• Responsive Web Design
• Tools for mobile web
• Mobile browsers

Tobi is on hand during office hours to chat with you about all things Mesos, including:

• Mesos at whatever level of detail, from 30,000ft down to the underlying C++ actor library
• Using Mesos frameworks like Marathon, Chronos, Kubernetes, Spark, Jenkins, Hadoop, etc.
• Writing Mesos frameworks in a variety of languages

Want to know how to make Flapjack alert via PagerDuty? Following their Flapjack tutorial, Lindsay and Jesse will cover that, these topics, and others:

• How to use Flapjack’s HTTP Broker to get free heartbeating (with TTLs!) from within your app or infrastructure
• How to pull in alerts from CloudWatch and other webhook-based alerting platforms
• How to connect Flapjack with Sensu and run it in parallel to your existing Nagios infrastructure

Mikey tackled the most-closely watched government IT project of all time, and lived to tell of it! Come talk to him about lessons learned and:

• Guiding interested individuals to the specific government sector opportunities that match their availability and skills (basically recruiting, but for a broad spectrum of both government agencies and private sector contractors).
• Helping people who have their own company and want to get involved with the government somehow

Are you ready to face the hard truth about continuous delivery? Avishai is on hand to discuss the issues with you. Bring him your questions on:

• DevOps and organizational culture
• Continuous Delivery
• Systems reliability

Ask Tom anything! Really. But especially bring him your questions and ideas about:

• Time management issues
• Google Apps tricks for working better as a team
• Anything about his books or The Practice of Cloud System Administration

Women have a place at the command prompt, and this panel of successful women already in Ops are here to encourage, share success stories, and practical tips. Come talk about Operations and:

• Work/life balance
• Diversity
• Career growth/planning

You can bring John all your operations and DevOps questions, but don’t stop there. He’ll be happy to talk to you about any of the subjects on his mind, including:

• The work we do versus the work we think we do
• How your workplace can be blame-free but infinitely more responsible
• What kinds of business philosophies motivate people to do their best

Curious about how eBay and PayPal measure and improve site performance? Steve will be on hand to share his experiences and to talk about things like:

• CDN operations
• Performance measurement techniques
• Managing fully monetized sites for performance

What can you cook up with Chef today? Come talk to Mandi about Chef, DevOps, and any of the following topics or others:

• Organizational and Cultural Change
• Chef and Automation
• IT Modernization

Interested in learning more about the importance of systems testing? Stop by and chat with Doug about these topics and others:

• Production Readiness
• Monitoring best practices
• Systemic Testing

Marc will be glad to answer any of your questions about moving applications to the cloud, but he’s also looking forward to chatting with you about:

• DDoS Trends
• Website Security
• Performance Tips

Tammy and Kent are happy to talk to you about any of your performance-related questions, including:

• Image optimization challenges and best practices
• Advanced optimization techniques
• The business value of performance

Stop by and say hi to Renee. She’ll give you feedback on your business plan, and offer advice that will help you:

• Turn your project into a startup
• Raise funding for your startup

John and Baron will gladly review the details of the log-backed infrastructure and why and how it can often be better than API or queue-backed infrastructures. Other topics include:

• Discussion of the pain-points experienced at VividCortex as we transitioned to the log
• Brainstorming with you about your own infrastructures and how the log-backed infrastructure and kafka might apply to them
• VividCortex in general and how we are building best-in-class MySQL server performance monitoring tools

Ryan is here to chat with folks about how they can improve their monitoring systems’ alert notifications. He’s excited to talk about:

• Alert design
• Appropriate sources of context for alerts
• Ways to use Nagios to augment the on-call engineer

Stop by and ask Rob about anything related to his talk, or Verizon EdgeCast’s http platforms, or the following:

• Making software deployment flows safe+reliable at different layers of the stack
• Scaling and evolving measurement streams
• Random fun things like C++, Perl, SVN/Git conversions, emacs, Matlab, or biologically-inspired computer vision

Join Nikolas for an open discussion on subjects such as the importance of reflection, conflict intelligence, and conflict culture. He also invites you to examine:

• Breaking Down Silos—Pandora’s box or the Holy Grail?
• Complex problems and feedback loop mapping
• Participatory methods for team building and problem solving

Are you ready to probe deeper into the mystery of sustained adaptability? David is here to help. He’ll discuss:

• Outmaneuvering complexity in faster, better, cheaper world
• The risk of failure is due to brittle systems — how to overcome the risk of brittleness
• Proactive safety management — how to be prepared to be surprised

Are you ready to go beyond waterfall charts for visualizing data? Come talk to Mark about new techniques for viewing performance data and making responsive sites fast, including:

• Combining design and development cultures to lead with performance principles
• Running private WebPagetest instances on EC2
• Front-end performance monitoring using SpeedCurve

Over the last decade, technology has dramatically changed how our stock markets operate. It’s delivered on all of its promises of making all the things faster, more efficient and cheaper. Come talk to Zoran about:

• Lessons we’ve learned from technology’s influence on the stock market
• Practices for maintaining a reliable system
• How these practices are aligned with the web operations community

Nassim has a story to tell about Etsy’s journey to continuous integration, but would like to chat with you about your journey, too. Talk to Nassim about:

• Setting up CI pipelines for mobile apps
• Functional testing/calabash
• How amazing will it be when we won’t have to go through any app store

Your site’s gone big and you’re celebrating the impending rush of traffic. Congratulations. Come on by and talk to Brian about:

• Load testing methodologies
• How to simulate Real User traffic
• Security in DevOps

Join Tim O’Reilly and Mikey Dickerson for a special Office Hours discussion. They’ll answer your questions on IT in government, or anything about web operations, performance, and DevOps. In particular, they’d like to talk about:

• The new US Digital Services Playbook
• Healthcare.gov, other government projects, and how you can become involved
• Applying these lessons learned to your current work

David would be happy to talk with you about all things monitoring. Come to his office hour to learn about:

• Reducing alert fatigue through better planning
• Why we monitor things, and how understanding why makes monitoring better
• Using monitoring tools and techniques to prove out software engineering assumptions
• Closing and shortening the feedback loop between Dev and Ops

I look forward to chatting with you about the mobile web versus hybrid apps versus native apps, and moving between the three, as well as:

• Fomenting a grassroots testing culture
• Unit testing of legacy code
• A/B testing, UX design and the importance of causal narratives
• Social Engineering greater productivity

In Steve’s session, he’ll tell you the 17 things you need to know about website performance. If you have questions about those 17—or maybe you have a burning curiosity about #18—stop by to see Steve. He’s happy to discuss things like:

• How to get to the data that matters in website performance testing
• Synthetic Testing and Real User Monitoring: How to use them to get the best assessment of user experience
• Identifying the performance metrics that matter most to your organization

Join Barbara to talk about 3rd-party monsters and how we can tame them. She’s on hand to:

• Answer your questions about 3rd-party scripts
• Discuss how to make them faster, more stable, secure and reliable
• Hear your stories and ideas about dealing with them

Fast and responsive images are on Sergey’s mind and he’s happy to share his ideas with you. Stop by and chat about:

• Real world responsive images implementations
• Web performance analysis
• Web performance community

Engineering principles can apply across the spectrum of any organization, including yours. Jay is here to share these ideas with you and discuss:

• The application of software engineering practices to building infrastructure to create flexible, scalable and reliable distributed systems
• How to build distributed systems in a highly regulated environment, even in the cloud
• Starting up new products or businesses from scratch, and jumpstarting those teams with engineering athletes and software craftsmen

If you deal with with ASP.NET, including ASP.NET websites in the cloud (Azure, EC2, Rackspace, etc.), and want to improve the performance of your sites, come talk to Dene and Robin about:

• The basics of web performance, for those just starting out or going back to basics
• Web performance in an ASP.NET environment
• Web performance culture in the office —how to inspire all areas of our business to think about web performance and its affects on our customers

Do you want to know how to apply the same tests that you run against a desktop website to browsers on both Android and iOS devices (without requiring any code to be rewritten)? Jonah is your man. He is also happy to discuss:

• Mobile Testing with Appium
• Running Tests on Sauce Labs’ cloud infrastructure
• Automated Functional Testing: best practices

Do you feel like talking about automated hardware provisioning in the real world? Sean is ready to field your questions on the following topics and more:

• Datacenter management
• Automating hardware provisioning
• Atomic hosts and containerization