Lindsay is a sought-after professional speaker, speaking on technology culture, DevOps, digital transformation, and building high performing teams.
These are the highlights.
Delivering Simpler, Clearer, Faster government services with Cloud Foundry
Nobody interacts with government because they want to - they interact with government because they have to, and most people come away from online interactions feeling more confused than when they started.
That’s why the Digital Transformation Office was created in 2015 – to change the way Australian governments deliver services, by relentlessly focusing all delivery activities on user needs, and modernising technical delivery methods.
Cloud Foundry is at the core of this technical modernisation, with the DTO providing a Cloud Foundry-based delivery platform to government for building new services. Every team gets a CD pipeline, centralised monitoring and logging, and an app runtime – driving a culture change through tools.
In this talk we’ll learn about the problems with the traditional approach to digital service delivery in government, what opportunities Cloud Foundry creates for architecting the delivery of user-focused services, and how Cloud Foundry enables the DTO to help government deliver simpler, clearer, faster public services.
A longer, broader version of this talk is also available.
Managing remotely, while remotely managing
Distributed teams unlock access to new talent from diverse backgrounds, and create opportunities for more humane ways of working.
But it takes a lot of works to reap the benefits. In this talk you will learn strategies for effectively bootstrapping, growing, and adapting distributed teams.
The DevOps Field Guide to Understanding Cognitive Biases
As devops practitioners we focus on improving the culture of collaboration so that others play nicely with us & we play nicely with others - but what if the biggest thing holding us back from change is our own brains?
Cognitive biases can deeply affect our behaviours towards others by herding us towards mental shortcuts that are optimised for timeliness over accuracy, at the expense of rationalising irrational behaviour.
You are probably pushing these biases onto other people every day but don’t even know it. Does that idea make you feel unconfortable? You are probably experiencing the Semmelweis reflex kicking your confirmation bias right now.
Knowing is half the battle. This talk will delve into some of the well-known and less well-known biases that may be affecting your ability to work with your peers, and your team’s ability to work constructively with other teams.
Attendees will leave the talk with an overview of biases they run into every day, how to hack their brains to use these biases to their advantage, and some tips on how to mitigate the effects of the limitations baked into their wetware.
We have met the enemy and he is us.
Escalating complexity: DevOps learnings from Air France 447
On June 1, 2009 Air France 447 crashed into the Atlantic ocean killing all 228 passengers and crew. The 15 minutes leading up to the impact were a terrifying demonstration of the how thick the fog of war is in complex systems.
Mainstream reports of the incident put the blame on the pilots - a common motif in incident reports that conveniently ignore a simple fact: people were just actors within a complex system, doing their best based on the information at hand.
While the systems you build and operate likely don’t control the fate of people’s lives, they share many of the same complexity characteristics. Dev and Ops can learn an abundance from how the feedback loops between these aviation systems are designed and how these systems are operated.
In this talk we cover what happened on the flight, why the mainstream explanation doesn’t add up, how design assumptions can impact people’s ability to respond to rapidly developing situations, and how to improve your operational effectiveness when dealing with rapidly developing failure scenarios.