Working technology for a political campaign involves the shortest timelines, tightest deadlines, and highest stakes you will likely ever encounter in a technology career. Come hear a tale of two political campaigns - a state measure campaign and a presidential campaign - and the application of both DevOps technologies and culture to move fast, pivot quickly, and hopefully win. One of the key challenges of politics - as well as DevOps in general - is harnessing automation without losing the critical human touch which moves hearts and changes minds. Learn how to find the line where too much automation (yes, there is such a thing) is counterproductive and you need to pull back to maintain a personal connection with voters, customers, employees, and more. You will also walk away knowing how to take the lessons and experience learned to future campaigns and projects - especially when your candidate, product, etc. does not end up winning. There is value - sometimes more value - in a loss as well as a win. Learn how to take what you can, iterate, and refine it for a future application.
Nell Shamrell-Harrington is a Software Development Engineer at Chef, focusing on the Habitat open source product. She is also CTO of Operation Code - a non-profit dedicated to teaching software engineer skills to Veterans that heavily creates and uses open source. Additionally, she is a technology volunteer for multiple political campaigns. She specializes in Chef, Ruby, Rails, Rust, DevOps, and Regular Expressions and has traveled the world speaking on these topics. Prior to entering the world of software development, she studied and worked in the field of Theatre.