Lightweight Change Control Using Git

Mini Tutorial
Friday, November 13, 2015 - 11:00am-12:30pm

George Beech, Stack Overflow

George Beech, Stack Overflow

George has been an SRE generalist at Stack Exchange since October, 2011. Before that, he worked for a multinational CRM company running their IVR infrastructure. He has worked on every part of the stack from Windows, to Linux, to the network infrastructure. He is currently serving his first term as a LOPSA Director.

His experience working in the IT field over more than a decade has led him to love working with multiple technologies, and allowed him to experience everything from running a small network as a consultant to being part of a large team running very large scale infrastructure.

Description: 

This tutorial will introduce the basics of Change Control systems, and give a brief overview of some of the common patterns that exist. Next, we will cover how Stack Exchange handles change control in a lightweight, easy to mange, and familiar - to developers and system administrators - way.

Note: In order to play with the script, attendees need to have Python available as well as a GitLab instance set up.

Who should attend: 
  • Anyone who has never worked with change control;
  • Anyone looking to implement change control; or
  • Anyone who would like to simplify change control at their organization

This should generally be considered a 100 level course, for people who want to learn more about change control and automating those processes.

Take back to work: 

Attendees will be able to take back a better understanding of change management, and how they can simplify the processes around change management. They will also be able to take back a simpler setup that doesn't compromise on the benefit of having a change control proccess.

Topics include: 
  • A talk about change control methodologies and strategies
  • Our philosophy when implementing change control 
  • Why Git is a good change control tool 
  • Lightweight
  • Everyone already uses it daily
  • The process that Stack Exchange uses
  • Where we use it
  • How approvals work
  • What is documented
  • The tools we built to make it even easier for people to make requests
  • What we want to implement in the future.
  • How our process works when it meets reality
  • Some of the issues and troubles that we have run into implementing this process