…and other stories from an ops-less world.

Three years ago 99designs transitioned away from having an ops team. Not “we now have a devops team”, not “we’ve switched to calling our sysadmins SREs”, but instead all operations work is done by regular web developers. The business has continued to grow, and contrary to expectations, the site is more reliable than ever.

The talk will be about how we made it work, why it works for us, and how it could (in whole or part) work for you.

In a modern development team the code review process is a critical and high value activity - but what is the managers role in it?

In this talk I'll argue that the developers are the players in the game and managers are part coach and part referee. We'll explore how to find the balance between reasonable supervision and micromanagement and what the daily habits you should build as to engage with the process.