Marta Paciorkowska

Every other company is looking for ninjas, cowboys or superheroes. Every other conference talk is full of jokes, puns, comedy skits and personality. Nowadays, conferences breathe showmanship, but in our need to be the best of the best, or the funniest of the funniest, we are excluding others. When less than exceptional becomes not good enough, the barrier of entry goes up and it is the underrepresented groups that suffer. When did we start mistaking programming conferences for stand up comedy shows? Our drive to be edgy, exceptional, memorable or controversial too often ends up with distressed audiences and badly handled PR scandals. This talk’s aim is to reflect on how this is a problem, how we’re all losing and how the cult of the stage hero needs to stop.

"Culture", "tearing down the silos", "continuous integration", "infrastructure orchestration", … Did DevOps fall into the buzzwords trap? Do some of us use certain terms mechanically, just because everybody's doing it, without a 100% confidence we grasped their meaning? Or, even worse: we are more than positive we got it, but we actually didn't?

Let's do a sanity check: will we be able to tell the difference between sentences authored by actual people and a well-fed Markov chain text generator? The condition of our community rests on our shoulders!

Video.

Have you ever pondered on the similarities between programming languages and literature? If you haven't, here's your chance! Just as the development of literature can be divided into epochs with their distinctive themes, there are stages in the evolution of programming languages. Code and literature have more in common than you think! Let's have a look at programming languages and compare them to well known works of literature to (hopefully) come to a conclusion that programming does not exist in a cultural vacuum and that its development is significantly inspired by culture.

A talk given at the Ada Lovelace Day Mini-Conference in Oslo on October 8th 2019: https://techwomen.no/ada-lovelace-day-2019.html

What's it like to switch to IT from another field? What makes IT infrastructure so interesting for me? A high level overview of the most important shifts in infrastructure in the last years.

A lightning talk I gave introducing the diversity drives innovation approach (starts at 10:35).

When DevOps came, it brought hope to the tired masses, enprisoned in the nauseating siloses of their tiring existence. But now once-faithful disciples have proclaimed DevOps dead. The Dark Ages of #NoOps have arrived. Some people are rejoicing, others are weeping. Everyone is asking: will DevOps stay dead forever? Or will it be rediscovered and given a new name (just like containers and microservices) to bring hope to us all, once againg? Let's observe the original followers and the various sects that sprouted from the DevOps seed and try to determine if DevOps will indeed stay dead forever.