Unexpectedly now doing a session at DDD North 2013

I had a surprise exchange of text messages last night with Andy Westgarth. Sadly, one of the people who was to speak in one of the first session slots has had to pull out. Andy did the thing all the best conference organisers do – he called his friends! As a result, Richard and myself will be presenting a session about our experience with Lab Manager on Saturday morning.

Lab Manager is an interesting part of the development puzzle, allowing automated provisioning of environments that can then have software deployed to them and automated tests run against them. However, building a good Lab Manager environment (or machines to then be composed into an environment) is a very different task than the bare-metal scripting guerrilla devops approach that is very en-vogue right now. Richard and I will speak about how we run our Lab from both the perspective of the development/ALM specialist (that would be him!) and the IT guy (that would be me!).

I’ve also been asked to take lots of photos at the event, so if you see me wandering around with my camera, smile and say hi!