Raju Gandhi
Great Lakes Software Symposium
Chicago · November 2 - 4, 2018
Founder, DefMacro Software
Raju is a software craftsman with almost 20 years of hands-on experience scoping, architecting, designing, implementing full stack applications.
He provides a 360 view of the development cycle, is proficient in a variety of programming languages and paradigms, experienced with software development methodologies, as well an expert in infrastructure and tooling.
He has long been in the pursuit of hermeticism across the development stack by championing immutability during development (with languages like Clojure), deployment (leveraging tools like Docker and Kubernetes), and provisioning and configuration via code (toolkits like Ansible, Terraform, Packer, everything-as-code).
Raju is a published author, internationally known public speaker and trainer.
Raju can be found on Twitter as @looselytyped.
In his spare time, you will find Raju reading, playing with technology, or spending time with his wonderful (and significantly better) other half.
Presentations
Infrastructure-As-A-Code with Ansible
An integral part to any DevOps effort involves automation. No longer do we wish to manage tens, hundreds or even thousands of servers by hand, even if that were possible. What we need is a programmatic way to create and configure servers, be those for local development, all the way to production.
This is where tools like Ansible come into play. Ansible offers us a way to define what our server configurations are to look like using plain-text, version-controlled configuration files.
Not only does this help with avoiding “snow-flakes”, but it promotes server configuration to participate in the SDLC, pulling server configuration closer to the developers.
Ansible (best) practices
Ansible, like Git, aims to be a simple tool.
The benefit here is that the level of abstraction that Ansible offers is paper-thin, with no complicated workflows, or opinions enforced by the tool itself.
The downside is that without a prescribed approach to Ansible, developing your playbooks often becomes a case of trial-and-error.
As engineers steeped in the DevOps mindset we must be able to use the tool effectively, allowing us to accelerate and shorten the lead time from development to production.
Pipelines-as-a-Code with Jenkins 2+
We developers really like code.
Code, being plain-text, can be version-controlled, versioned, and follow a traditional SDLC lifecycle.
For the longest time however, we were forced to live with having most of our Ci/Cd and server configurations live outside of our codebases, often at the mercy of infrastructure/operations teams.
With the evolution of DevOps comes the notions of constructs like IaaC (Infrastructure-As-A-Code), and with Jenkins 2.0, we can now manage our Jenkins jobs configurations as code!
Web Apps with Angular - Part I
In this session we will take a look at building applications with Angular. We will build a very simple application from the ground up, and attempt to understand the approach of Angular, as well as understand some of the terminology that Angular introduces.
This session will focus on the Angular 10
Web Apps with Angular - Part II
In this session we will take a look at building applications with Angular. We will build a very simple application from the ground up, and attempt to understand the approach of Angular, as well as understand some of the terminology that Angular introduces.
This session will focus on the Angular 10
On being an effective developer
As developers we not only operate in different contexts, but also often have these different contexts interplay as part of our work.
Each of the tools that we use — version control systems like Git (along with collaborative tools like Github/Gitlab), IDE's like Eclipse/IntelliJ, build systems like Gradle, Ci/Cd tooling like Jenkins, IaaC tools like Ansible, the command line — all introduce context.
To be effective developers we need to know when to operate in a certain context, combine or tease apart how these contexts interplay.
Can you improve your release announcements if format your commit messages consistently? You bet!
How should your build tool interact with your version control system?
What does naming your files have to do with how you use your IDE?