Perspectives from Tesco hosted first GitHub MeetUp in Bengaluru

29 Mar 2016

I was delighted to be invited to attend and present at Tesco’s first ever GitHub Bengaluru, an amazing event on Monday 14th March with over 450+ attendees at the Marriott Hotel in Bengaluru.

Kicking the evening off was Jon Higgins who is Technology Director, Group Engineering Operations (DevOps and Continuous Delivery) at Tesco PLC and part of their DevOps Transformation team. Jon talked about how the entire organisation revolves around the kingpin tool, GitHub. Tesco utilize GitHub Enterprise to deliver the benefits of social coding with the ring fenced security of containing code in the enterprise. Social coding was a key theme of the event, and it enables anyone to comment and contribute to anyone’s code line by line. By hosting the GitHub event, Tesco brought together members of the Bengaluru IT community to emphasise the role social coding plays in the enterprise to help drive innovation and DevOps practises.

Brent Beer, Enterprise Solutions Engineer at GitHub showcased some of the latest features of GitHub and GitHub Enterprise. His presentation also reinforced some of the major GitHub benefits to keep development teams “in the groove”. By eliminating unnecessary meetings, GitHub allows developers to spend more time coding, which allows the development teams to focus on flow over features. Additionally, having historical decision criteria around code changes allows developers to focus on how instead of why.

The concept of Inner Sourcing as shown in the book Getting Started with InnerSource by PayPal (2015) was also explored by Brent. This concept enables cross-team cooperation and encourages anyone to contribute to any development projects. Apart from a great overview, Brent also ably fielded multiple (and in some cases tough) questions from the audience with great success.

There then followed a series of Lightning Talk from local Bengaluru companies including Rohit Ranjan, Visa’s Director of Engineering, Smitha Rao, Senior Technology Leader at Cisco, and Tesco’s Siddhartha Roy, who spoke about transient benchmark environments, Jenkins spun up environments in Azure/AWS, and how to run your tests and tear them down again.

Brent, Smitha and Rohit joined Jon and Vidya Laxman, who is Technology Director at Tesco plc, for a panel discussion on the concept of social coding and how it improves inter-team developer collaboration and performance. They answered questions on how to successfully collaborate at scale to create great software and how sharing code encourages innovation.

Joshua Anderson (Product Manager - Developer Tooling at Tesco) then rewarded the audience with all their twitter interaction by handing out a selection of prizes and there were some prolific tweeters out there!! Just take a look at#tescogithub to see just how many.

All of this helped work up an appetite and after dinner, there were additional technical talks to make it a truly informative evening. First up was Neependra Khare, who founded the Docker Bengaluru MeetUps and gave a great overview of the impact that Containers are making to business agility. 2016 is set to see an inflection point in enterprise Docker adoption.

I then followed with a talk focusing on automation as a core DevOps component. I illustrated this using Chef as an example, and explained the advantages of infrastructure as code. These benefits include enabling organizations to programmatically provision and configure components, and reconstruct business from code repositories, data backups and compute resources. I also talked through the Chef Delivery Workflow and its various components, and answered questions arising from the presentation.

A highly engaged and successful evening was completed with networking between the attendees over dinner and great interest in another event later in the year. Many congratulations to the Tesco team (Joshua Anderson, Jon Higgins, Vidya Laxman, Arun Narayanaswamy and many more) for organizing, hosting and delivering an evening packed with valuable content, insights and mutual knowledge sharing. I am already looking forward to the next one.