I was invited to speak earlier tonight at the Phoenix Java User’s Group on Play Framework, DevOps, and AWS.

I decided to do a basic walkthrough of Play Framework, and to build a continuous deployment pipeline live as part of the presentation. I wanted to actually implement something so that (a) I would be forced to pick specific technologies I could talk about, and (b) I could talk about the real-world challenges of implementing something.

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I spoke today at Iterate.PHX, a DevOps conference put on right here in Phoenix, AZ.

My topic was on choosing the right framework for running docker containers in production. I specifically focus on the “multi-container VM” paradigm since if you’re OK to just run a single container per VM, then you don’t really need a framework at all. In that case, Docker is really just your deployment artifact.

The slides are below, and if there’s a video of the talk I’ll add that here as well. Enjoy!

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My second presentation at Desert Code Camp 2014.2 was on Amazon Web Services.

It was exciting to see standing room only during the talk! My main concern was keeping it interesting. The natural temptation for this kind of presentation is to do a “documentation summary” but that risks afflicting the audience with severe boredom. So I used a lot of visuals and everyday analogies in explaining AWS.

I spoke both about the big picture, and then went into detail on two of the most popular AWS services, EC2 and S3. I also briefly described VPC, IAM, RDS, DynamoDB, Glacier, and SES. I received numerous positive comments on the talk, so I’m pleased post the slides below.

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I gave two presentations at Desert Code Camp 2014.2 earlier today. The first was an intro to EmberJS.

Ember is known for its steep initial learning curve and it was an interesting challenge trying to pack in so many concepts in 60 minutes. I had a great time preparing for, and giving the talk.

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I gave this talk at Desert Code Camp earlier today as part of the DevOps track. It gives an introduction to Chef with a special emphasis on getting you to Hello World and beyond.

They say Chef has a steep learning curve, but I think that’s only because there are a lot of concepts you need to know before you can do the most basic things. I tried to cover most of those concepts here. I also included some best practices I discovered such as how to handle secrets like passwords and certificates using Chef.

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I recently gave a talk at Desert Code Camp 2013.2 on an introduction to Play Framework. I’m just getting started with it, but there are several concepts that got me interested:

• Non-blocking / Evented vs. Threaded
• Command-line interface to compile, test, and more
• Clearly inspired by the productivity Ruby on Rails, but written for Java
• Written using a Functional Programming paradigm
• Super-easy for creating RESTful web services

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