A Brief History of Release Engineering

Thursday, 31 October, 2024 - 11:4512:05 GMT

Dinah McNutt, MongoDB

Abstract: 

TL;DR This talk is a humorous (hopefully) retrospective on release engineering. How did we get from building binaries using a command line to all the fancy CI/CD systems we have today?

Things we used to do seem ridiculous today. Can looking back help us move forward? What’s the evolution and career path of a release engineer? Has the role become diluted through overuse and misuse?

Please join in the fun and include your anecdotes and experiences in the slack channel.

Dinah McNutt, MongoDB

Dinah McNutt is a TPM for MongoDB and based in Dublin, Ireland. She has over 35 years of experience in systems administration, release engineering and software development. She has written for various publications over the years including the Daemons and Dragons column for UNIX Review magazine and Byte Magazine. She was the program chair for several USENIX Release Engineering Summits and LISA VIII. She’s given talks and taught tutorials at numerous conferences including LISA, FlowCon, and RELENG 2014.

BibTeX
@conference {302247,
author = {Dinah McNutt},
title = {A Brief History of Release Engineering},
year = {2024},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}

Presentation Video