Forem: tara k

PagerDuty Community Year in Review: 2022

tara k — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 23:28:36 +0000

Hey, y’all!

Things have slowed down significantly in PagerDuty land, so we figured now would be a great time to look back at all the cool stuff we got to be part of in 2022, in our own words.

Scott McAllister

Graduating the Terraform Provider to a dedicated engineer

When I joined PagerDuty back in 2019 one of the first things I was introduced to was the Terraform Provider for PagerDuty. It was an extremely active project that was created and run completely by members of the community. PagerDuty had no official involvement at the time.

A colleague mentioned how great it would be for someone at PagerDuty to contribute to the provider code. So, I dug into the project, learned Go, and opened a pull request. Since that time there have been nearly 450 more pull requests on the project, and we have been able to discover that users of the PagerDuty provider make more than 20-million API calls a week.

Because of this success we decided it was time to hire our first dedicated engineer to focus their time on Terraform provider development. José Antonio Reyes joined PagerDuty in July of this year and has taken ownership of Terraform provider development. I enjoyed my time working with the provider but I’m also excited to see where José takes it.

Back Out on the Road Again

One of my favorite highlights of 2022 has been the return to in-person events. I’ve had the opportunity to attend and present at several conferences this year. Here are a few of the highlights.

Kansas City Developer Conference (KCDC)

Scott McAllister

@stmcallister

That was fun! Thanks y'all for coming to my Flexbox/CSS Grid talk at @kc_dc! #kcdc2022

Here's a link to demo code: github.com/stmcallister/f…

21:00 PM - 09 Aug 2022

GoLab

GoLab

@golab_conf

Thanks to @stmcallister for his talk about testing in #golang #golab2022

15:41 PM - 04 Oct 2022

Connect.Tech

Scott McAllister

@stmcallister

Thanks to everyone who came to my talk at #ConnectTech! @connect_js

You can get the code I was demoing here:. github.com/stmcallister/f…

20:48 PM - 09 Nov 2022

HashiTalks Build

Terraform Time

We also kicked off a show on the PagerDuty Twitch Channel this year called Terraform Time. Every Monday we talk about various topics surrounding Terraform. Among my favorite episodes were when we had Andreas Lundgren from Storytel join as a guest. He talked about using Terraform with Google Cloud Provider (GCP) and PagerDuty. He even wrote a blog post about his setup.

Another great episode was when we had Alena Pantuzenko from the PagerDuty Engineering team join and introduce the Event Orchestration feature she and her team added to the provider.

Mandi Walls

This year felt like two years squished together. We did so much stuff it’s hard to keep track of all of it!

I was super happy to be back on the road to see all you folks at DevOpsDays. Shout out to the folks in:
Boise
Raleigh
DC
Charlotte
Tel Aviv!

It was great to chat with folks in different stages of their DevOps journeys about what they are learning and how their organizations are changing and improving. Reports of the demise of DevOps are greatly exaggerated. ;)

In between all the in-person events that restarted this year, we had some different stories on the podcast. Stuart Clark was our first guest talking about networking, which was super interesting! We also had Sean Steacy on to talk about one of my favorite things: turning off services that have lived their lives.
Additionally, I know different kinds of communities are important to tech folks, so I invited benny Vasquez on to talk about Open Source communities, and Mary Thengvall and Julie Gunderson to talk about Developer Communities.

I hope folks who are looking for a fun community join us here, or come hang out with us on Twitch, or join us on the podcast next year!

Kat Gaines

When I joined the team in October 2021, the first few conferences I was invited to present at were all virtual, and while those events were fun, this year I was able to spend some time on the road presenting at and attending conferences in person. It was really satisfying to connect with folks face-to-face and really exciting to pass that milestone of my first in-person talks as part of this team!

The events that put me on the road this year ranged from developer events to customer support focused events, and the support events felt pretty special because there are just fewer opportunities for this community to gather. ElevateCX was a high-impact agenda packed into two days, followed up not too much later by similar energy at Support Driven Expo. One of the other highlights was Dreamforce, where I partnered up with Sonal Moraes at Slack to talk about automating incident response across operations and service.

Even with IRL events being a ton of fun, there was joy to be found in virtual events too. Lesbians Who Tech was a hybrid event this year, and I was invited to speak during the virtual portion, where I was met by a curious and supportive audience whose welcoming energy I could feel through the screen.

Finally, I also really enjoyed some of the podcast episodes we worked on this year. Tying into the topics I spoke about at some of the customer support focused events mentioned above, one of my favorite conversations on the podcast was Support Career Stories, when I invited Andra Burck, Isabella Applen, and Pablo Gonzalez to share their career stories and advice for others. I’ll echo Mandi’s call to action to join us on the podcast because I really love having these conversations with our community!

Tara King

Joining PagerDuty!

My big win for the year absolutely has to be joining PagerDuty’s Developer Advocacy team in May. It’s been a delight to work with Kat, Mandi, and Scott, and to get to know the amazing community of folks who use PagerDuty every day. I even got to meet them all in person in July! And we had a legendary breakfast together:

Also I now get to have a Pagey on my desk. 📟

Literature + Tech = ❤️

My other highlight was giving a brand new talk at Drupal Diversity & Inclusion Camp, called Stories Make Meaning; Meaning Makes Change. This event brings together a wide range of new and experienced speakers, and it felt like a really great space for launching a new talk combining my passion for diversity in tech with my love of literature & story structure.

PagerDuty Community Update: November 18, 2022

tara k — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 17:53:06 +0000

Hello and happy Friday! Welcome to the PagerDuty Community Weekly Update! Next week is US Thanksgiving, so we’ll be off enjoying the long weekend.

Good News

PagerDuty was nominated for Best End-to-End DevOps Tool/Service in the DevOps Dozen 2022 Awards.

Voting is now open! Lots of tough competition here–we’d be honored to have your vote for PagerDuty.

Cool Stuff

Process Automation 4.8.0 was released last week and this week we had Forrest and Jake on the Twitch stream to talk about two excellent new features:

RSS Feed Plugin helps you know when issues are upstream of your applications. Subscribe to providers’ update feeds to track incidents and outages that impact your systems.
Job Resume gives you the ability to restart a multi-step job from a failure. We think both of these will be super helpful to folks using Process Automation and Rundeck OSS. The recording will be on YouTube shortly. ## Find us in person! Where in the world is PagerDuty DevRel? It’s almost the end of the year, so things are slowing down.
Scott’s going to be at re:Invent. He’ll be giving a number of talks at the PagerDuty booth in our booth theater!
In December, Mandi and the EMEA PagerDuty folks will be at DevOpsDays Tel Aviv! Registration is open now!

We hope to see you! Say hi, we might have PagerDuty stickers. :D

We’re also virtual!

Mandi presented Best Practices for On Call Teams at DeveloperWeek Enterprise on Tuesday, and on Thursday, she presented at Heavybit’s DevGuild: Incident Response.
Julie Gunderson of AWS and Paula Thrasher, Senior Director, Engineering Infrastructure here at PagerDuty joined Kat for a webinar on Thursday: Humans, Robots, and Incident Response!

Thursday was also the quarterly Terraform Roundtable. Some of the topics we covered were:

Using tools like Terraformer to import large batches of existing objects into your Terraform state
When using a simple terraform import was appropriate
How you can generate HCL from your your existing state by using the terraform state show (state show docs)
How to set up the GitHub Change Events integration through Terraform

All of these topics will be addressed during future Terraform Time episodes on twitch.tv/pagerduty. You can also register now for our next Terraform Roundtable coming up in February 2023!

On the Podcast

This week, Scott talked to Rob Dickinson about API Security! Subscribe to Page it to the Limit so you never miss an episode.

Have a suggestion for a guest we should have on? Let us know! We’re looking for guests for Q1 2023 to record in November and December. That could be YOU!

We’re looking for a modern NOC story if you have some experience there and would like to share!

On Twitch

We’re on Twitch three times a week, covering all things PagerDuty. Our regular shows are:

PagerDuty Garage, the show about the PagerDuty API: Mondays at 10am Eastern / 7am Pacific
Terraform Time: Mondays at 4pm Eastern / 1pm Pacific
HowTo Happy Hour: Fridays at 4pm Eastern / 1pm Pacific.

Follow our channel for alerts when we go live! You can also view our most recent episodes on Twitch. You can see some of our earlier streams on the YouTube playlist.

Get in Touch

If you have a question about PagerDuty, check out our Community Forums for advice from friendly folks. If you’d like to be on our podcast or Twitch, or just say hi, email us at community-team@pagerduty.com. We’d love to hear what you’re doing with PagerDuty!

Follow us on Twitter!

And….are you still hanging out on Twitter? Where are people gathering these days?

PagerDuty Community Weekly Update, September 16, 2022

tara k — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 16:55:35 +0000

Hi everyone! Welcome to the PagerDuty Community Weekly Update! Here you’ll find what’s going on in PagerDuty land. Busy week here!

Cool Stuff

PagerDuty alum Matty Stratton asked on Twitter:

matty stratton 🇺🇦 💜

@mattstratton

For you personally, what was the most impactful event in the history of devops

18:55 PM - 15 Sep 2022

For you personally, what was the most impactful event in the history of DevOps? Some interesting replies! What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Find us in person!

We have live in-person sessions coming up!
Mandi is at DevOpsDays DC to co-present Reducing Trauma in Production with SLOs and Chaos Engineering with Julie Gunderson.

DevOpsDays DC

@devopsdaysdc

Maybe you've heard about SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and chaos engineering, but how can they can all help you help your users. Come see @lnxchk and @julie_Gund will show you how you can apply these concepts to your projects and delight your users
#devops
devopsdays.org/events/2022-wa…

18:47 PM - 09 Sep 2022

Kat will be at Dreamforce (nice!),September 19-22 in San Francisco, to present Automate Incident Response Between Operations & Customers, and at ElevateCX September 29 & 30 in Denver, to give her talk Happy Agents = Happy Customers.

Scott is taking his talk Built-in Testing in Go is More Than Just Passable to GoLab.io October 2-4 in Florence, Italy and at Indy.Code() October 19!

We hope to see you! Say hi, we might have PagerDuty stickers. :D

Our automation folks are looking to start some in-person meetings with members of the Rundeck Open Source community. If that’s you, let us know!

We’re also virtual!

Mandi was part of the Community of Practice Roundtable session at ChefConf on Tuesday. Now available on demand!

Kat was at the DeveloperWeek Cloud virtual followup this week to give her talk Happy Agents = Happy Customers.

Tara will be presenting Stories Make Meaning. Meaning Makes Change at Drupal Diversity & Inclusion Camp. Join Tara for a deep dive into storytelling & how it can help you at work. Yes, even if you're an engineer.

PagerDuty Staff SRE Rich Lafferty was part of Sumo Logic Illuminate September 13-14! Register to watch his session Service Level Objectives: The secret sauce behind service reliability and high performing teams. Hear more from Rich in his episode of our podcast.

Mandi’s also going to be at Conf42 Incident Management on September 29th. Check out the event details on the Conf42 site.

On the Podcast

Last week, PagerDuty’s own Jake Cohen joined Mandi to talk about Runbook Automation. Don’t miss it! Subscribe to Page it to the Limit on your favorite podcast app, or listen online!

We publish new episodes about twice a month, so make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any. Next up is Service Mesh!

On Twitch

We’re on Twitch three times a week, covering all things PagerDuty. Our regular shows are:
PagerDuty Garage, the show about the PagerDuty API: Mondays at 10am Eastern / 7am Pacific
Terraform Time: Mondays at 4pm Eastern / 1pm Pacific
HowTo Happy Hour: Fridays at 4pm Eastern / 1pm Pacific.
Follow our channel for alerts when we go live! You can also view our most recent episodes on Twitch. You can see some of our earlier streams on the YouTube playlist.

The Process Automation folks were back with us on September 13th to talk about the 4.6.0 release! It will be up on YouTube soon.

Coming up later in September, our data science folks will be joining the HowTo Happy Hour to talk about some of the features of Intelligent Alert Grouping. Sign up for a reminder!

On the Blog

Salesforce and Datadog are important integrations for many PagerDuty users. Learn more about how these integrations work and what they can do for your teams! You can also find us at Dreamforce and Datadog DASH!