Last week, I was honored to give the closing talk at RelEng Conf 2015, here in Florence, Italy.

I’ve used this same title in previous presentations; the mindset it portrays still feels important to me. Every time I give this presentation, I am invigorated by the enthusiastic response, and work to improve further, so I re-write it again. This most recent presentation at RelEngConf2015 was almost a complete re-write; only a couple of slides remain from the original. Click on the thumbnail to get the slides

The main focus of this talk was:
1) Release Engineers build pipelines, while developers build products. When done correctly, this pipeline makes the entire company more effective. By contrast, done incorrectly, broken pipelines will hamper a company – sometimes fatally. This different perspective and career focus is important to keep in mind when hiring to solve company infrastructure problems.

2) Release Engineers routinely talk and listen with developers and testers, typically about the current project-in-progress. Thats good – we obviously need to keep doing that. However, I believe that Release Engineers also need to spend time talking to and listening with people who have a very different perspective – people who care about the fate of the *company*, as opposed to a specific project, and have a very different longer-term perspective. Typically, these people have titles like Founder/CxO/VP but every company has different cultural leaders and uses slightly different titles, so some detective work is in order. The important point here is to talk with people who care about the fate of the company, as opposed to the fate of a specific project – and keep that perspective in mind when building a pipeline that helps *all* your customers.

3) To illustrate these points, I then went into detail on some technical, and culture change, projects to highlight their strategic importance.

As usual, it was a lively presentation with lots of active Q+A during the talk, as well as the following break-out session. Afterwards, 25 of us managed to find a great dinner (without a reservation!) in a nearby restaurant where the geek talk continued at full force for several more hours.

All in all, a wonderful day.

It was also great to meet up with catlee in person again. We both had lots to catch up on, in work and in life.

Bram Adams, Christian, Foutse, Kim and Stephany Bellomo all deserve ongoing credit for continuing to make this unusual and very educational conference come to life, as well as for curating the openness that is the hallmark of this event. As usual, I love the mix of academic researchers and industry practitioners, with talks alternating between industry and academic speakers all day long. The different perspectives, and the eagerness of everyone to have fully honest “what worked, what didnt work” conversations with others from very different backgrounds is truly refreshing… and was very informative for everyone. I’m already looking forward to the next RelEngConf!!

[updated to fix some typos. John 28may2015]