David Duncan, Amazon Web Services: Aligning With Open Source Principles

Is there such a thing as too much enthusiasm for automation? Probably not. But it can be difficult to unify an organization with strong opinions. Vincenzo Sposito shares how Discover harnessed its teams’ passions to build a unified automation solution—while preserving debate and experimentation.

The tensions between security and operations and developer teams are the stuff of legend. DevSecOps is trying to change that, and automation is a big part of making it possible. But automation alone can’t overcome entrenched behavior. 

Joylynn Kirui shares how Microsoft is helping shift security considerations to the left—and alleviating the headaches that process can bring. Because in the long run, everyone is better off with better security.

No single person can automate a whole company’s IT. Even most teams would need some help. But it’s also not likely you can immediately get everyone to automate their own work right away. So how do you get it done? 

Sudheer Kumar Donthineni explains how Ulta Beauty makes the most of its small team of 3 automation experts. Through the power of collaboration, they’re able to make significant progress with automation—and help their employees grow.

Establishing consistent automation habits helps keep those skills sharp and gets the systems set up promptly. But getting to that point takes time. And even when automating processes becomes second nature, you can still overlook potential pitfalls. 

Joshua Bradley of Cox Edge describes what it’s like managing the expectations teams and stakeholders may have about automating infrastructure. The systems may be more complex. Timelines may be longer. And even when you leave detailed instructions, users may still make mistakes. It just means you need to keep adjusting until you get it right.

Making automation work takes more than just writing the scripts. And it’s most effective when it becomes a habit rather than a one-off project. But building habits and changing culture is no easy task. 

Eduardo Krumholz and David Linthicum of Deloitte help their clients internalize automation as part of their workflows. They share their strategies to help their customers make that transition successful—and overcome reluctance to change.

World Wide Technology (WWT) helps organizations set up their tech infrastructure. But they also have to do it for themselves. It’s a lot to juggle with their ambitious goals for growth. Automation is helping them get to where they want to go—but it took them a few years to find a solution the team bought into.  Corey Wanless and Jason Kayser share what WWT wanted to achieve with automation, the challenges they faced, and how it helped the people of WWT come together.

Automation is a game-changer. It promises to decrease time to deploy, reduce errors, and increase reliability and efficiency. But you can’t automate change. 

What does it take for teams to actually reach that finish line? And how does it affect how they actually work? Season 2 of Code Comments goes beyond the sales pitch and features teams who’ve tackled automation. Because there’s no script for adjusting to automation.

The idea behind extended reality, or XR, is immersion. That can be a hard standard to meet when dealing with a visual interface. As an intern at NVIDIA, Hayden Wolff stepped up to tackle a thorny challenge, and with some assistance from natural language processing (NLP), the company’s Project Mellon is changing the way we look at the design process.

Connecting tools and systems yields all sorts of benefits. What can be tricky is knowing exactly what those benefits are - especially emergent ones. Neesha Godbole, a Partner Account Manager with MuleSoft, shares how mapping the benefits of joint projects is about finding more than the sum of the parts. But it doesn’t make a difference if you can’t communicate the value to customers.

Change may seem exciting for some. But for those who are moving from one platform, or one technology, to the next, it can be a daunting, anxiety-filled experience. For Dynatrace’s Markie Duby, keeping empathy at the center of one’s work is crucial for building trust and for collaborating with customers as they adapt to an industry that never stops moving.