Looking back on 2012

February 04, 2013

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/spacex/44451125454/ (opens in a new tab)

2012 has been an exciting year, full of change and merriment. Here's my retrospective.

Excella ConsultingExcella Consulting logo

The majority of 2012 I spent working at Excella Consulting, a great local IT and Agile consulting firm. While there, I worked on advancing their Java Center of Excellence.  I enjoyed my stay there and learned a lot from everybody.  I worked with some great clients and had a blast.  Excella is a bunch of smart individuals and I highly recommend hiring them or working for them.  They are a great place to work.

Mike McGarr presenting a 'Deployment Pipelines' slide to an audiencePublic Speaking

One of the highlights of 2012 has to be the number of public speaking engagements I had throughout the year. Most of my talks centered on my favorite topic, Continuous Delivery. I was able to speak at not only user groups, but a couple of conferences as well. Here's a quick run-down of the public speaking engagements I had in 2012:

It is hard to pick my favorite speaking engagement. It was an honor to speak at Agile DC and a lot of fun being a part of the first DC Agile Engineering Conference. It was also awesome to go to Richmond to speak. I love the crowd at MCJUG as well.

The DC Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment MeetupCover of Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley

In 2012, I started the DC Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment Meetup (opens in a new tab). This has been an awesome experience and a lot of fun to get not only my friends to speak, but also some industry big wigs. The group meets once a month to discuss real-life war stories. While we have only had four meetings, it has been an awesome experience that I hope to build on in 2013. Please join the group and come out and have fun. I am hoping to have future meetings at BB HQ.

The highlights of this group was having Paul Duvall (opens in a new tab), the primary author of THE Continuous Integration (opens in a new tab) book, came to speak about Continuous Delivery in the Cloud (opens in a new tab). Depsite the A/V outage in the middle of his talk, he did a great job and it was a great experience.

Our first meeting of 2013 is tomorrow night, where Sanjeev Sharma from IBM will talk about DevOps for Mobile applications (opens in a new tab).

Early and Often

While I do enjoy blogging, I was only able to compose 20 blog posts in 2012. That's a pretty low number all things considered. My blog did get some decent traffic, with a total of 25K views over the year. Unfortunately, my most popular posts were not from this year, but from previous years. I hope to double the number of posts in 2013.

A grid of photos of many different people, all from a Google Image Search for Stephen Feldman
All pictures of Stephen Feldman from Google Image Search.

Meeting Steve

Sometime in the middle of summer, my friend Andy Glover (opens in a new tab) sent me an email asking if I was interested in a DevOps gig at Blackboard (opens in a new tab). The email was from Steve Feldman (opens in a new tab) who was looking for a team lead.  At the time, I was already contemplating my next move and agreed to meet Steve for coffee. I was working at a client in DC and decided to walk to BB for coffee. It was a pretty long walk, but it was worth it. Steve shows up in a golf shirt, short and sandals. That was the first good sign. The second good sign was that Steve had brought with him a printout of a blog entry I had written from 2011. Steve and I hit it off and he explained what he was looking for. This sounded great. The third good sign was when Steve invited me to play golf. I love golf. It was a great course and a great day.

Over the course of the months, Steve and I continued to discuss the opportunity. Eventually I met with other members of Blackboard and an offer was made. I promptly turned in my resignation at Excella Consulting and joined Blackboard as the Director of Learn DevOps.

Getting started at Blackboard

November saw my first day at Blackboard. I was excited to have an office and a great team to work with. I knew that I would be spending the first month or so learning as much as I could about the DevOps team and how Blackboard develops Learn. I spent most of November in one on onemeetings. Besides HR tasks, little else was accomplished.

In December, I started working on my assessment of the Learn Product Development organization. It was exciting working with members of the various departments and learning all I could about how the "cheese was made".  The process took longer than I expected but I put together a presentation for management and it went well.  Now, I have just have to execute on my plan.  The fun begins!