From Zero to GitOps Heroes
Channel: Weaveworks, Inc.
Date: 30/03/2022

From Zero to GitOps Hero!
Speakers:
- Mae Large, Staff Field Engineer
- Russ Parmer, Senior Technology Engineer
- Priyanka "Pinky" Ravi, Developer Experience Engineer

Slides of this talk are here: https://www.slideshare.net/weaveworks/from-zero-to-gitops-heroes

Change is hard, especially when it involves multiple teams across multiple departments working together in new ways at a large organization in a heavily regulated industry.

Join Mae Large, Russ Parmer, and Priyanka “Pinky” Ravi as they reflect back on their time together implementing GitOps to achieve a better experience for more than 7000 developers! During this session they share key learnings from their early days of assessing GitOps as an idea and methodology to how it evolved into the de facto automated software change process in less than 1 year.

Key takeaways from this talk:
- The value of a GitOps Platform Team
- How to take advantage of your existing toolbox
- How to address audit, compliance, risk/security, change management concerns or requirements
- How to support and improve upon the process continually regardless of changes in tooling, people, etc.

Speaker Bios:
Mae Large is currently a Staff Field Engineer at VMware. She has worked as a software developer/engineer throughout her career starting in the Philippines where she was born and raised. She had the opportunity to work in Finland and in India at a consulting capacity. She worked at a large insurance company for 15 years in various roles focused on SDLC (software dev life cycle) and drove the Delivery Engineering topic where she continuously simplified how features (code change) ultimately makes it to the hands of customers. This same topic is what she's currently engaged in at VMware as a field engineer, focusing on providing a sustainable and secure software supply chain to customers.

Russ Parmer is a Senior Technology Engineer. His primary focus has been helping to enable and mature the CI/CD practices for public cloud and Kubernetes environments. He began his career in retail management before being blessed with the opportunity to return to school. In 2015 he earned a Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering degree from Arizona State University. He likes to tell people he took the ‘scenic route’ through college, but it is more of a reminder that it’s never too late to achieve your dreams. He’s been married to his fantastic wife for 12 years and they have 2 (mostly) wonderful children (ages 8 and 6) that do their best to keep their parents on their toes. He and his wife both enjoy fitness and the outdoors.

Priyanka “Pinky” Ravi is a Developer Experience Engineer at Weaveworks. She has worked on a multitude of topics including front end development, UI automation for testing and API development. Previously she was a software developer at a large insurance company where she was on the delivery engineering team working on GitOps enablement. She was instrumental in the multi-tenancy migration to utilize Flux for an internal Kubernetes offering. Outside of work, Priyanka enjoys hanging out with her husband and two rescue dogs as well as traveling around the globe.