Earlier this month, the Buildkite community came together for the second annual Unblock conference. Spoiler alert: it was a great time!
Whether you’re feeling a little FOMO because you couldn’t join us live or if, like me, you were there but are feeling a little nostalgic about the two days of CI/CD fun, I’ve got some good news for you: all of the Talks are now available on-demand — Let’s jump in!
Day 1: Storytelling, pipelines, and a flaky test tracker beta
On Day 1, we were welcomed by Staff Developer Advocate Mel Kaulfuss and Product Engineer Rose Lu aka the official Unblock MCs/in-house kazoo talent before Buildkite Cofounder and CEO Keith Pitt took the virtual stage.
Keith Pitt Unblock '22 keynote
In his keynote, Keith talked about what Buildkite’s been up to in 2022 (including launching our new product, Test Analytics, and releases such as Kubernetes support, EC2 Stack for Mac, and UI refreshes). He discussed more about storytelling in DevOps (and how it’s lacking), and shared a couple of ideas he’s been tinkering with–focused on visualizing and defining pipelines (all open source). Plus, he talked a bit about giving ourselves permission to play and experiment, which is how he initially discovered our breakthrough dynamic pipelines feature.
You can find Keith’s experiments here:
Following Keith’s updates, we heard from some of our friends at Hasura, Aviator, Wix, Retool, nib, Cevo, Equinix, and PagerDuty.
- 🎥 A World Tour of Dynamic Pipelines by Vishnu Bharathi, Technical Lead at Hasura
- 🎥 Merge Strategies for (Large) Monorepos by Spriha Tucker, Cofounder of Aviator
- 🎥 Terraform Practices: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly by Hila Fish, Senior DevOps Engineer at Wix
- 🎥 Moving Retool's CI to Kubernetes by Anna Yan, Tech Lead at Wix
- 🎥 Scalable Pipelines for ML and Conversational AI by Dom Sammut, Senior Engineering Manager at nib
- 🎥 Productivity Augmentation In the Software Development Life Cycle by Gokul Venugopal, AWS Infrastructure & Solution Architect at Cevo
- 🎥 Finding Flaky Tests with Test Analytics by Gordon Chan, Senior Software Engineer at Buildkite ** Gordon also shared a preview of the Flaky Test Tracker; If you’re interested in participating in the private beta, sign up here.
At this point of Day 1, we took a break. Well, we called it a “break” but that doesn’t mean there weren’t plenty of options for things to do during the Day 1 Break.
Unblock '22 Day 1 demo session with Shipyard's Benjie De Groot.
Shipyard Cofounder and CEO Benjie De Groot gave us a live demo of how Shipyard works with your existing Docker Compose file to manage the lifecycle of your ephemeral environments on every code change. 🔥
AWS at Unblock '22.
AWS Partner Solutions Architect Faraz Masood and Buildkite Solutions Architect Daniel Ring were ready for any AWS/Buildkite integration question you could throw at them in the AWS booth.
Unblock '22 Day 1 Session with Buildkite’s Mike Morgan.
Buildkite Solutions Architect Mike Morgan hosted the “Why Buildkite?” session where he shared some of the things that differentiate Buildkite from others and took questions live. (It was a busy session and Mike says thanks to everyone who joined him!)
Unblock '22 Day 1 Session with Buildkite’s Rose Lu and Mel Kaulfuss.
Finally, for those looking for a more break-ish type of Break, Rose Lu and Mel Kaulfuss pulled double-duty by stepping off the Main Stage to host the Cozy Craft Circle. There, they had a chance to check in with Unblock attendees, grab a snack, and work on their Unblock 2022 printable crafts together. 🫶
After that, it was back to business on the Main Stage as we finished out the day with our friends Sarah and Bobby!
- 🎥 How Equinix's Bare Metal Cloud Keeps Up with New OS Releases by Sarah Funkhouse, Delivery Engineering Manager at Equinix
- 🎥 Hey! Who Broke the Thing and How Do I Fix It? by Bobby Zimmerman, Solutions Consultant at PagerDuty
We ended the day by having several of the Day 1 Speakers join Mel and Rose live to answer some of the great questions posed by the attendees.
Day 2: More DevOps storytelling, a little kazoo, and big thanks
Fueled by our Day 1 high and perhaps more than a little caffeine, we kicked off Day 2 with… more kazoo!
Unblock '22 MCs Mel Kaulfuss and Rose Lu.
Truly, the instrumental skills of our MCs was something to behold. Alas, we couldn’t listen to their sweet tunes all day as there was more Unblocking to do by some of the folks from Uber, Cruise, Cash App, Shipyard, Culture Amp, Twilio, Cloudsmith, AWS, and Buildkite.
- 🎥 Building Fast, Reliable, and Scalable CI at Uber by Buildkite by Xiaoyang Tan, Senior Software Engineer at Uber and Tyler French, Software Engineer II at Uber
- 🎥 Using Buildkite for HIL (Hardware-In-the-Loop) Testing by Alan Mond, Staff Software Engineer, Embedded Systems at Cruise
- 🎥 Buildkite Agents and OIDC by Sam Cochran, Principle Engineer at Buildkite
- 🎥 Understanding Attack Surfaces in CI/CD Pipelines by Svet Marina, Software Engineer at Cash App and Inny So, Engineering Manager at Cash App
- 🎥 Have Your CI Treat Your Pre-production Environments Like Cattle Not Pets by Benjie De Groot, Cofounder and CEO at Shipyard
- 🎥 Reproducible Machine Learning with Buildkite by Andy MacKinlay, Tech Lead on the NLP Team at Culture Amp
- 🎥 Zero to Kubernetes GitOps with Buildkite by Robbie DelPrete, Staff Software Engineer at Twilio
- 🎥 Actionable SBOMs with Cloudsmith and Buildkite by Ciara Carey, Developer Relations at Cloudsmith
- 🎥 What’s New About AWS Graviton by Arthur Petitpierre, Graviton Principal Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS
Big thanks are in order
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it takes a village to raise a conference. Unblock 2022 was a success thanks to the thought, effort, and energy of a lot of people over the past many months. (Just to give you an idea, Unblock 2023 planning is already underway!)
A heartfelt thank you to:
Unblock ‘22 Day 1 Panel Speakers and MCs.
Unblock ‘22 Day 2 Panel Speakers and MCs.
All 21 of the Unblock 2022 Speakers and their supporting teams. You all so kindly shared your insights and expertise with the Buildkite community and we appreciate the time and energy you put in.
Unblock '22 Sponsors.
The Unblock 2022 Sponsors who jumped on board and were just as excited to connect with the community as we were.
Thank you.
And thank you to you! It’s the conversations we have with you every day throughout the year that drive all of the work happening here at Buildkite.
Keep an eye out for more events from our team in 2023!
