Episode 63

Developer User Experience With Alan Gross

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June 21st, 2023

44 mins 20 secs

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About this Episode

Alan Gross, Solutions Architect & Tech Lead at Sandia National Laboratories, joins Carolyn to talk about how DevOps is being leveraged to support the Department of Energy's contractor operated research lab. Alan dives into some of the initiatives at Sandia National Laboratories, and how he is applying his personal philosophy around user experience ops, or "UX Ops," to support the mission.

Key Topics

  • [01:12] About Sandia National Laboratories
  • [03:50] Sandia's role in national security
  • [06:25] DevOps versus DevSecOps
  • [13:45] Department of Energy and Sandia
  • [17:40] Sandia initiatives: a year of climate in a day & Hypersonic weapons
  • [21:00] Alan's DevOps journey and advice for developers
  • [33:55] Tech Talk questions

Quotable Quotes

Alan on DevOps: " DevOps is about trying to deliver quickly and learn from your mistakes as fast as you can. So shifting left is part of that philosophy. If you have security issues with your software, you want to know about that as quickly as possible, because if you've already deployed to production, it's almost too late." - Alan Gross

On what advice Alan would give to new developers: "It's about failing fast and failing forward...How quickly can you learn new things, get new code and new products out in front of your users, and understand how they engaged with that." - Alan Gross

About Our Guest

Alan works as a full stack developer and technical lead at Sandia National Labs, with six years of experience in web technologies development. He develops within Python, Angular and .NET ecosystems, with a focus on enabling the developer experience at Sandia with novel solutions for the labs’ diverse development, software governance, security and business intelligence needs. Alan leads a team that is committed to reducing technical debt by emphasizing DevSecOps, modern application architecture (such as microservices) and data-driven outcomes.

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