David Sandilands
David Sandilands is an author and I.T. infrastructure expert who focuses on the management of Puppet’s development ecosystem and integrations. Prior to this, he worked within Puppet’s customer services team where he helped Puppet’s largest customers deliver infrastructure automation at scale and contributed to their DevOps working practices.
In 2023, David published “Puppet 8 for DevOps Engineers” which is available through major book outlets. That year, he also became a DevOps Advisory Board Member for DevNetwork. David’s expertise is called upon for the annual State of DevOps Report (SODOR), and he’s also a frequent contributor to Puppet’s “Pulling the Strings” podcast, a community event presenter, and a popular webinar guest.
David has a passion for delivering change into traditional working environments, breaking down team silos, and integrating DevOps practices within heavily regulated and audited environments. Before joining Puppet by Perforce, David spent eight years at NatWest as a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer delivering their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Platform.
Outside of work, David is an accomplished hillwalker (Munroist number: 3085) having climbed all 282 of the Scottish Monros. He also enjoys sci-fi and fantasy books and regularly visits Scotland's tractor parks with his wife and two sons.
Session
Jim Collins’ Five Stages of Decline shows how many great companies overstep themselves and suddenly find themselves falling, more and more rapidly. See, most startups only care about early growth—just like tech debt, we think we can always come back to sustainability after we’ve made it. Open source community is a great way to kickstart that initial success and growth. It’s practically free and your users are throwing contributions at you left and right....
We hit that peak much sooner than we anticipated and without having built a sustainable community foundation we shoot right off the cliff and go screaming down the decline on the other side. As we fall, we grasp at whatever straws we can, chasing new technologies or rapidly throwing new products at the wall hoping they’ll stick. Nothing does, of course. The accountants show up to bleed you dry, and then the lawyers finish you off.
And you? You’ve probably still got a few of those rad swag t-shirts from the heyday, right?
This doesn’t have to be the only story. David is here to tell you how to recognize when you've reached maturity so you know how to ease into the long tail of maintenance, engaging and working with your community to build a long-term sustainable business, solving the problems your customers bring to you. It’s hard work and it takes every-single-day consistency. But it does get easier with practice.