Mark Shead
President of Xeric Corporation
Mark Shead is the president of Xeric Corporation where he helps organizations increase their return on investment in software development. He has worked extensively as a coach with the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve Banks implementing Agile development and deployment practices. He specializes in helping teams use DevOps to build development/deployment pipelines in organizations with legacy change management policies and turning six-month deployments cycles into something measured in hours.
Zeus' Guide to Software Delivery
Myths of ancient Greek gods and heroes were an underlying foundation in Roman statecraft. To deny a Roman the study of Homer was to effectively bar them from participating in public discourse. These rich stories have been used for generations as an aid in thinking, discussing, and reasoning about contemporary problems and issues. While our idea of software wasn't something the ancient Greeks or Romans could even imagine, the universal truths and warnings from their stories have valuable lessons in how we deliver software today.
When Hercules faced the Hydra, he encountered the same problem that plagues many software developers as they grow a code base. Hercules' solution works on code just as well as it does on a multi-headed beast. Modern-day software projects can end up acting like Theseus when he sailed from defeating the Minotaur if they don't intentionally avoid his small but disastrous mistake.
Creating software is hard, but many of the challenges we face are merely different forms of age-old difficulties. In this talk, we will explore obstacles that commonly occur in the process of creating and delivering software and compare them with stories from the ancient world as we dig into what they show us about our daily challenges.
Myths of ancient Greek gods and heroes were an underlying foundation in Roman statecraft. To deny a Roman the study of Homer was to effectively bar them from participating in public discourse. These rich stories have been used for generations as an aid in thinking, discussing, and reasoning about contemporary problems and issues. While our idea of software wasn't something the ancient Greeks or Romans could even imagine, the universal truths and warnings from their stories have valuable lessons in how we deliver software today.
When Hercules faced the Hydra, he encountered the same problem that plagues many software developers as they grow a code base. Hercules' solution works on code just as well as it does on a multi-headed beast. Modern-day software projects can end up acting like Theseus when he sailed from defeating the Minotaur if they don't intentionally avoid his small but disastrous mistake.
Creating software is hard, but many of the challenges we face are merely different forms of age-old difficulties. In this talk, we will explore obstacles that commonly occur in the process of creating and delivering software and compare them with stories from the ancient world as we dig into what they show us about our daily challenges.
When Hercules faced the Hydra, he encountered the same problem that plagues many software developers as they grow a code base. Hercules' solution works on code just as well as it does on a multi-headed beast. Modern-day software projects can end up acting like Theseus when he sailed from defeating the Minotaur if they don't intentionally avoid his small but disastrous mistake.
Creating software is hard, but many of the challenges we face are merely different forms of age-old difficulties. In this talk, we will explore obstacles that commonly occur in the process of creating and delivering software and compare them with stories from the ancient world as we dig into what they show us about our daily challenges.