At the March 2nd Meetup we'll host guest speaker Brendan O'Leary from GitLab and hold a Lean Coffee session with Meetup members. What is Lean Coffee? It's a structured but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and begin a discussion to learn and create. Do you have a Lean Coffee topic you'd like to suggest or hear more about? Please email [masked] with your suggestions, which we'll vote on at the event.

The evening will be an interactive event with lots of opportunities for Q&A. Please note that we'll be starting at the earlier time of 6:00 pm. Here’s more info about Brendan's presentation and demo:

GitLab CI/CD with Brendan O’Leary, Senior Developer Evangelist:

For many years, we lived in a world where it was hard for an average engineering organization to have truly professional-grade tools and processes to build and release software. The industry reaction to that was an explosion of tools that, in some ways, make it more confusing when trying to understand what your team should spend their time on. You want your team to spend their time delivering value for your customers, not stitching together different tools. However, understanding the best practices around CI and CD learned over the past decade is critical for large-scale production applications. That is - the ability to reliably and repeatable build, test, deploy review applications and deploy to production - is critical for collaborating and delivering better software faster. In this talk and demo, we'll spend some time going over the lessons learned, and then use that understanding to explore what how GitLab CI/CD came to be. And how a single application for your entire DevOps lifecycle can get your team back to what they do best - engineering amazing software for your customers.

Brendan O'Leary is a Senior Developer Evangelist at GitLab, the first single application for the DevSecOps lifecycle as well as a governing board member at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and advisor to various startups. That means he connects with developers, contributes to open source projects, and shares his work with about cutting-edge technologies on conference panels, meetups, in contributed articles and on blogs. He has a passion for software development and iterating on processes just as quickly as we iterate on code. Working with customers to deliver value is what drives Brendan's passion for DevOps and smooth CI/CD implementation. Brendan has worked with a wide range of customers - from the nation's top healthcare institutions to environmental services companies to the Department of Defense. Outside of work, you'll find Brendan with 1 to 4 kids hanging off of him at any given time or occasionally finding a moment alone to build something in his workshop.

Please RSVP quickly and let us know what burning issue we should discuss over Lean Coffee!