The Great British DevOps




The Great British Bake Off (GBBO) is a reality TV show where amateur bakers compete in a series of challenges designed to test their knowledge, creativity and technical ability in baking. GBBO has taken the world by storm, and is popular for its feel good, light-hearted and positive content. All the contestants work hard, excel at their craft, take their failures/lessons gracefully and cheer each other on. When you’re used to reality TV shows being, cutthroat, negative and greed induced this outlier seems so special and unique. But, what can this rare example teach us about DevOps? Can this magic chemistry be applied to our teams? Diving deeper into the group dynamic, values, support mechanisms, motivations, etc, we can glean many lessons about building effective and joyful engineering cultures.

In this talk we’ll dig into topics including:

  • non-traditional experience
  • setting clear expectations
  • self-competition
  • shared struggle
  • encouraging creativity & risk taking
  • constructive feedback
  • recognition & motivation

Attendees of this talk will take away valuable insights and practical direction for fostering positive engineering culture in their workplaces.

Speaker

sarah-zelechoski

Sarah Zelechoski

 
Sarah began her career as an astrophysicist and has pivoted often between systems and development work, but really hit her stride in operations. She has run production operations and infrastructure ...