JUC Speaker Blog Series: Will Soula, JUC U.S. East

I am very excited to be attending the Jenkins User Conference on the East Coast this year. This will be my third presentation at a JUC and fourth time to attend, but my first on the East Coast. I have learned about a lot of cool stuff in the past, which is why I started presenting, to tell people about the cool stuff we are doing at Drilling Info. One of the cooler things we have implemented in the last year is Chat Ops and our bot Sparky. It started as something neat to play with ("Oooo lots of kittens") but quickly turned into something more serious.

Ever get asked the same questions over and over? What jobs to run to deploy your code? What is the status of the build? These question and more can all be automated so you do not have to keep answering them. Furthermore, when you do get asked you can show them, and everyone else, how to get the information by issuing the proper commands in a chat room for everyone to see. With chat rooms functioning as the 21st century water coolers, putting the information in the middle of the conversation is a powerful teaching technique. You are not sending people to some out dated documentation on how to get their code deployed, nor are you showing them the steps today only to be forgotten tomorrow. Instead you can deploy your code and they see the exact steps needed to get their code deployed.

Even more impressive is the way ChatOps can bring your company together. Recently our CTO got a hipchat account so he could interact with Sparky. This gave me the idea that if we extend Sparky to deliver information useful to the other teams (Sales, Marketing, Finance, etc) then we would be able to get these wildly disparate teams in the same chat room together and hopefully they will talk and learn from each other. Where DevOps is the bringing together of Dev and Ops, ChatOps can be the bridge across the entire organization. Come see my presentation Day 1: Track 1 at 4:00 PM to learn how ChatOps can enrich your team, how Drilling Info is using it, and what our future plans entail for ChatOps.

This post is by Will Soula, Senior Configuration Management/Build Engineer at Drilling Info. If you have your ticket to JUC U.S. East, you can attend his talk "Chat Ops and Jenkins" on Day 1.

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