James Governor's Monkchips

Coming Very Soon: Monki Gras 2014. Why You Should Get Involved

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And so now it’s just a few weeks until my signature conference is back – Monki Gras: where craft tech meets craft beer. The theme this year is Sharing Craft, following last year’s look at Scaling Craft.

The theme came from a conversation earlier this year with Kohsuke Kawaguchi, founder of the Jenkins Continuous Integration server, on a Google Hangout about Cloud, DevOps and Continuous Integration, sponsored by IBM.

Kohsuke made a point that resonated with me really strongly.

“We really haven’t figured out how to share what people do in one context to another. We have these conferences where people come in and talk about the amazing things they have done. But for someone else to replicate that work, it’s basically all custom made from scratch.”

Blammo! We’re generally terrible at sharing knowledge within, let alone across, domains. And so the theme Sharing Craft was born.

I am really excited to say Kohsuke will be at Monki Gras 2014 to help us unpack these ideas. And given my colleague Donnie’s current research directions, he will have plenty to say on the subject.

The parallel universes of DevOps and cloud developers

When I think about people who live in that foggy world between development and operations, I can’t help being reminded of a China Miéville novel called The City & the City. It’s about two cities that literally overlap in geography, with the residents of each completely ignoring the other — and any violations, or breaches, of that separation are quickly enforced by a shadowy organization known as the Breach.

Much like people starting from development or operations, or for you San Franciscans, the Mission’s weird juxtaposition of its pre-tech and tech populations, The City & the City is a story of parallel universes coexisting in the same space. When I look at the DevOps “community” today, what I generally see is a near-total lack of overlap between people who started on the dev side and on the ops side.

The industry has tried to overcome these issues with massive uber frameworks such as SSA, Corba, ITIL, UML and so on, but these efforts generally all fail.

At Redmonk we believe in people over process, which is why we run this event series.

Monki Gras 2014 will be all about knowledge sharing and cross functional learning – with some talks from brewers, artists and historians along the way. I am really looking forward to Greg Brockman, Stripe’s CTO, talking about how the craft of Mathematics can improve software development.

We have plenty of amazing speakers including the aforementioned Kohsuke, Leisa Reichelt from GDS UK, Elaine Lennox of Zend, Theo Schlossnagle, CEO of OmniTI, Rafe Colborn from Etsy data/ops, Narinder Singh, chief troublemaker at Appirio. Ana Nelson will tell us how making documentation beautiful can help bridge semantic gaps.

Initial sponsors include Appirio, Amazon Web Services, Basho, IBM, EMC, and Perforce.

And of course the catering and craft beer will be amazing. Plenty of surprises in store…. A new evening magical mystery tour, and food created by a chef from one of London’s top restaurants. Belgian beers, and a celebration of the Sour.

If you work in software development, and want to understand the latest thinking in how to do it right, you should come. If you’re a software vendor that wants to be part of a conversation with people building and defining the future you should come along too, and sponsor us of course. Even if you just find craft interesting there will be plenty to enjoy in the two day conference, hosted at the venue I co-founded, the Village Hall, Shoreditch.

This is not the biggest software development event, but we optimise for quality, not size. We’ll create a Dunbar-sized village for two days, and it will rock. All talks will also be videoed, though we won’t be streaming.

You should buy a ticket here.

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