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Summary of five years

“What have you been doing these last few years?” was the question Péter Halácsy asked me during my visit to Prezi. I was there for the CTO equivalent of a developer exchange: learning how things were done at Prezi, sharing my observations, and then speaking at the Budapest Jenkins meetup. Prior to my visit Péter had come to this blog to learn more about me, only to learn that I’d not been blogging. I’m resolved to get back into the blogging habit this year and I decided I’d take the time to fill in the gap for any future Péters. In part this will recapitulate my LinkedIn profile but also describe some of what I felt was most significant.

The primary reason I only posted a single post after 2009 was that I joined Urbancode in a marketing/evangelism role and I posted almost everything I had to say under their masthead. In my two and half years there I had a great time spreading the word about build automation, continuous delivery and Devops. I was able to visit a wide range of companies, learn first hand about the challenges of enterprise organization, and then turn this information into new content. At Urbancode we developed a very good flow of information and almost every month we had a new webinar, a newsletter, and maybe a white paper. My primary content collaborator was Eric Minick and he has kept up those evangelizing ways at IBM following their acquisition of Urbancode.

After I left Urbancode we made a family decision to try living in London for a few years. I reached out to Douglas Squirrel and he brought me into TIM Group to do continuous delivery, infrastructure and operations. In my time there I’ve become CTO and Head of Product and I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to apply what I know, both about product development and about organizational change. I’ve been almost equally as absent from the TIM Group development blog, but I have managed to share some of our experiences and learning at a few conferences including GOTO Conference 2012 (talk description & slides: A Leap from Agile to DevOps), London Devops Days 2013 (video of talk: Crossing the Uncanny Valley of Culture through Mutual Learning),  and XPDay London 2014.

During my time in London Benjamin Mitchell has been one of the biggest influences on my thinking and approach to organizational change. Benjamin has been a guide to the work of Chris Argyris and Action Science. It has been what I’ve learned from and with Benjamin that has inspired me to start the London Action Science Meetup.

Finally, I couldn’t recap the last few years without also mentioning Paul Julius and CITCON. Since I last mentioned CITCON North America in Minneapolis on this blog in 2009 we’ve gone on to organize 16 additional CITCON events worldwide, most recently in Auckland (CITCON ANZ), Zagreb (CITCON Europe), Austin (CITCON North America), and Hong Kong (CITCON Asia). For PJ and I this is our 10th year of CITCON (and OIF, the Open Information Foundation) and it has been fantastic to continue to meet people throughout the world who care about improving the way we do software development.

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