The first two days featured talks in three streams on the subjects of Agile development, DevOps and container technology.
Particular highlights were the two compelling keynotes. The first was by Linda Rising (pictured left), a famous author and speaker in software 
development, who spoke about using trials – which she dubbed the good, the bad and the beautiful – in organisations. She advocated using small, cheap and fast trials of new processes and technologies rather than committing whole-heartedly to a new process and then reverting back later on.
The second keynote was by Alexis Richardson (pictured below) from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation about GitOps. This is a new approach to DevOps that makes it easier for developers to adopt because it revolves around Git, a familiar tool to software engineers that allows tracking of different versions of code.
Another interesting insight came from Amy Nicholson, whose team develops the Financial Times website. They have an A/B testing tool, which is a form of statistical test to measure the effect of changing features of the website. They have started applying it to test headlines themselves rather than just website features, a novel use of the technique which is now common across the Financial Times.
The final day consisted of several workshops on DevOps technologies, including Kubernetes and continuous deployment.
Chris participated in one of these workshops on Kubernetes and said that it gave a really comprehensive overview of the major topics surrounding the technology, and included references to cutting-edge software that builds on Kubernetes, something he and his colleagues might find useful in their own work.
The conference is an annual event, and given the growing interest in DevOps, Agile and containers, probably one to look out for in the future.
More information: Continuous Lifecycle Conference website
Images:
Linda Rising - credit: Continuous Lifecycle website
Alexis Richardson - credit: Roger Suffling
