GitHub & John Willis
Celebrating 2 Years of DevOps for Defense with GitHub and John Willis
Security Left with GitHub - CM All the Things
Our first speaker this month was Robert Freeman, the Lead Engineer for DoD and IC from GitHub. Robert and his partner Lucas were generous enough to fly down from DC to speak to our community. GitHub has been a great support for our DevOps for Defense meetup as the repository where we publish everything we do as open source. Over the past year, GitHub has made some great advancements in the past year with a focus on cyber security. These advancements not only provide capability to help our community shift left on cyber in our own development, but provide an improved cyber posture for the 3rd party and open source software we use.
You can find Robert’s talk on the DevOps for Defene YouTube channel.
Security & Compliance Theater - John Willis
Our second speaker was John Willis, the co-author of the DevOps Handbook. John also created and published the audiobook, Beyond the Phoenix Project, with Gene Kim which dives deep into the historical and engineering foundations of DevOps. I highly recommend both of these to anyone working to improve value creation and delivery of software / IT systems. John has a diverse and innovative background working across industry. John recently started a new program office at Red Hat. John shared some of his insights regarding the critical disease afflicting many DevOps transformations, Security & Compliance Theater. It was almost like John had spent months observing the challenges we see in our programs. John’s discussion of establishing rigorous digital attestation for each contributing element/artifact that makes up our systems gives us a clear and more secure approach than the traditional mountains of forms and boards that we tend to emrace.
You can find John’s talk on the DevOps for Defene YouTube channel.
Celebrating 2 Years of DevOps for Defense
This month we celebrated our 2 year anniversary with a great event. Thanks for everyone in our community for coming out. We had an amazing turnout with just over 70 people joining us. In addition to the amazing speakers we had some special guests. Our friends from Green Pea Press were there to make some great custom t-shirts.
Through the t-shirt sales we were able to raise hundreds of dollars for our local Girls Who Code chapter. Ms Marshall joined us and is looking for support to help her group of 30 young ladies get some really ambitious projects kicked off. If you’d like to get involved, you can contact Ms Marshall at Liberty Middle School.
We were also happy to welcome a special guest from Stack Overflow back to our meetup. Lou Manglass, who generously came to speak at our 1 year anniversary, came out to celebrate with us again.
Charts from the meetup are posted as open source to our GitHub repository.
Finally, we have now setup GitHub Sponsors for our meetup. If you get value from what we do in the community, please consider supporting us at any level you are comfortable with. Our sponsor, TEK Systems, has been extremely generous in their support this year and our organizers continue to contribute both financially and by volunteering their time. GitHub Sponsors provides a simple way for your to provide your support as well with the benefit of matching funds from GitHub and their parent company Microsoft. Everything we do for DevOps for Defense is 100% open source and volunteer based. Consider helping us continue to grow and bring new events to our community.
Attribution
Image by JD Black.