DevOps Workshop Duo

Real World CI/CD with GitHub Actions: Beyond Basics

In the rapidly evolving world of software development, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) stand as pillars of modern best practices. GitHub Actions has emerged as a powerful tool for automating these processes directly from your GitHub repository. This session aims to transcend beyond basic tutorials and dive into the sophisticated capabilities of GitHub Actions, offering insights into building, testing, and deploying applications with unparalleled efficiency.

Throughout this interactive session, we'll navigate through the intricacies of GitHub Actions, uncovering the potential of this automation powerhouse. You'll gain a deep understanding of advanced concepts and techniques, ensuring you can leverage GitHub Actions to its full extent for your projects. Here's what you'll learn:

• Optimizing GitHub Actions Runners: Master the art of selecting and optimizing runners for faster builds and deployments.
• Mastering YAML Workflow Syntax: From triggers to conditionals, learn to craft workflows that respond dynamically to the complexities of your project.
• Leveraging Advanced Features: Dive into job dependencies, matrix builds, and outputs for sophisticated workflow design.
• Securing with Environments and Secrets: Implement best practices for managing sensitive data and configuring secure deployment environments.
• Dynamic Deployments: Explore advanced deployment strategies to container registries and Azure, ensuring your application is delivered efficiently to the right platforms.

Enhanced with real-world examples, this session will equip you with the skills to implement advanced CI/CD workflows that streamline your development process, improve code quality, and accelerate deployment cycles. Whether you're looking to refine your existing CI/CD practices or expand your GitHub Actions expertise, this talk will provide valuable insights and techniques that are immediately applicable.

Join us to transform your GitHub repository into a CI/CD powerhouse, pushing the boundaries of what you thought possible with GitHub Actions.

Chris Ayers

Senior SRE at Microsoft

Chris Ayers is a Senior Site Reliability Engineer on Microsoft’s AzRel Risk SRE team, drawing on years of experience in cloud architecture, software development, and DevOps practices. He’s passionate about continuous improvement, driving reliability, and sharing industry best practices. Outside of work, Chris is a devoted father, technology enthusiast, and avid gamer. Connect with him online to explore insights into cloud operations, agile methodologies, and more.

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Level Up Azure DevOps Pipelines with YAML

CI/CD pipelines are core to good DevOps practices. So is infrastructure as code. This session will show you how to use the YAML support in Azure DevOps to define your pipelines and how YAML pipelines compare to the classic pipelines.

You'll see how to convert a classic pipeline to YAML, how to set up CI/CD, approvals, parameterized templates that can be shared across projects or teams, and how the tooling has matured to make YAML a viable alternative to the classic pipelines.

Matthew Burleigh

Software Development Manager, Bally Sports

Matt wrote his first program in Fortran on a card punch machine in the early 80s. He survived the experience and moved on to use Toolbook, Delphi, VB, and finally the .Net framework for the last 15 years. He still gets twitchy when someone mentions DCOM or CORBA and doesn't want to get into a discussion about where curly braces should go.

He is currently a Software Development Manager at Bally Sports focusing on Azure; previously he was a Senior Developer at Pandora Jewelry and a Lead Developer at Constellation/Exelon.

PostgreSQL Introduction for the SQL Server Developer or DBA

PostgreSQL is one of the fastest growing databases in the world. Every major cloud provider has one-click installations or full-blown serverless options that support PostgreSQL. With open-source licensing and time-tested stability, there’s a reason many businesses are using PostgreSQL for new projects, while at the same time, analyzing the ROI of converting existing applications.

All of this adds up to the increased likelihood that you will be asked to develop or support an application using PostgreSQL in the next few years.

In this workshop, I'll introduce you to PostgreSQL from the perspective of a former SQL Server developer that struggled through the transition. I’ll help you make the most of what you already know as a SQL Server user and teach you how to navigate the differences successfully.

In this session we’ll cover:

• An introduction to PostgreSQL, including some of the high-level differences from SQL Server
• Installation
• Tools for connecting and running queries
• Configuration
• A deep-dive on SQL through hands-on exercises
• Adding functionality through extensions
• Indexing
• Query tuning
• Stored procedures
• Functions and triggers
• Community

Learning a new database technology doesn’t have to be scary. By the end of this pre-conference workshop, you’ll have the knowledge and confidence to use your database skills in a new way. Whether at work or with a new hobby project, you’ll be ready to dive in and lead the team when PostgreSQL is the database being used.

Ryan Booz

Developer Advocate at Redgate

Ryan is an Advocate at Redgate focusing on PostgreSQL. Ryan has been working as a PostgreSQL advocate, developer, DBA and product manager for more than 20 years, primarily working with time-series data on PostgreSQL and the Microsoft Data Platform.

Ryan is a long-time DBA, starting with MySQL and Postgres in the late 90s. He spent more than 15 years working with SQL Server before returning to PostgreSQL full-time in 2018. He’s at the top of his game when he's learning something new about the data platform or teaching others about the technology he loves.

Dependency Injection in C#

Loosely coupled code is easier to maintain, extend, and test. Dependency Injection (DI) help us get there. In this workshop, we'll see how interfaces can add "seams" to our code that makes it more flexible and maintainable. From there, we'll dig into loose coupling with Dependency Injection. DI doesn't have to be complicated. With just a few simple changes to our constructors or properties, we can have code that is easy to extend and test.

After laying a good foundation, we'll take a closer look by diving into various DI patterns (such as constructor injection and property injection) as well as other patterns that help us handle interception and optional dependencies. Along the way, we'll see how DI helps us adhere to the SOLID principles in our code. We'll also we'll look at common stumbling blocks like dealing with constructor over-injection, managing static dependencies, and handling disposable dependencies.

Throughout the day, we'll go hands-on with labs to give you a chance to put the concepts into action.

If you're a C# developer who wants to get better with concepts like abstraction, loose coupling, extensibility, and unit testing, then this is the workshop for you.

Jeremy Clark

Developer Betterer

Jeremy helps developers by sharing his own struggles, mostly in technology, but also with being more social as an introvert, understanding potential for learning, and playing banjo. He has worked as a corporate developer, as a Chief Improvement Officer at a startup, and as a contract developer. Currently, he teaches developers through online courses, workshops, tech articles, and conference talks. He spends most of his time in C# and has recently ventured into Go (golang) and Rust (rust-lang) to explore some of his favorite topics: interfaces, delegates, concurrency, and parallel programming.

Off the Shelf AI

Hearing about artificial intelligence is unavoidable these days if you’re watching the news or staying abreast of the technical sector. We frequently hear about the power of AI-enabled tools and are shown sound-bites of experts extolling the virtues of their approach.

While these stories inform and entertain, they also create the perception that AI i s extremely difficult and exclusively the realm of experts, which simply isn’t true! These days we do not need to be an AI expert to reap the benefits of the research community. Off-the-shelf open-source tools exist which are powerful enough to solve many industrial problems. In this talk we will map business problems to tools and show how to translate a problem domain into the expected input of the tool. Using these tools will help us identify development opportunities that we might have otherwise missed and save time by not re-implementing common solving techniques.

In this talk, we’ll cover:

• Three common problems that can be solved with AI:
• Routing vehicles around a map
• Solving sudoku puzzles
• Building controllers for autonomous vehicles
• Three off-the-shelf tools that can solve these problems:
• Fastdownward
• Minisat
• OpenAI Gym
• The formalisms that allow us to translate the real world problems into ones these solvers recognize:
• Heuristic search
• Boolean Algebra
• Markov Decision Processes

Jordan Thayer

AI Strategist for SEP

Jordan Thayer received her PhD in Artificial Intelligence in 2012 from the University of New Hampshire. Ever since, she's been applying artificial intelligence in academia and industry to problems including intrusion detection, planning, static analysis, and program generation.

As a thought leader at SEP, she's been proving that AI isn't futuristic technology. Rather, it's a collection of techniques of varying levels of maturity that can often reliably solve problems they have today. She gives talks, runs workshop, visualizes algorithm behavior, and build proofs of concept as well as products to show what AI can do already.

Contain Your Enthusiam - A Full Day with Containers and Kubernetes

Spend a day learning about container technology from the ground up. Starting with Windows and Docker Container Fundamentals, moving to Kubernetes Concepts, then Kubernetes tools for managing multi-cluster, multi-cloud environments.

While not a hands-on, attendees are encouraged to follow along. A prerequisites document will be send out ahead of time for laptop setup to ease those who wish to follow along.

Jason van Brackel

Lead Associate @ Booz Allen Hamilton

Jason van Brackel is an engineer at Booz Allen Hamilton and the founder (and former organizer) of Kubernetes Philly. Passionate about solving real-world problems with software development and Kubernetes, he regularly shares his expertise—whether he’s guiding teams at work or streaming live coding sessions. When he’s not tinkering with cloud-native tools, you’ll find him spending time with his kids or occasionally taking a spill off his skateboard.