(A talk given at PIPELINE Conference – March 2018 – What can the ARPANET teach us about Continuous Delivery? – https://pipelineconf.info/speakers/)

“Computer Networks are fundamental to Continuous Delivery. They enable the flow of delivery pipelines without interruption. With the prominence of public cloud computing the destination of that delivery is increasingly on the public Internet, even if it’s use is private to an organisation.

If we look back to the origin of computer networks and the Internet’s precursor, the ARPANET, we find a distributed system, which as it grew was updated remotely and re-engineered via what was arguably one of the first ever Continuous Delivery Pipelines.

What can we learn from those pioneering days that is relevant to our practice today?

In this talk we’ll explore how vision, purpose, monitoring, testing, remote updates, communities of practice and refactoring allowed the ARPANET and the Internet that followed to continuously deliver both the software that powered it and the increased value it provided as it grew.

There will be a fair amount of audience participation as we will model the growth of the ARPANET with some, not to scale, cardboard models and bits of string.

This talk draws heavily on Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon’s book ‘Where wizards stay up late – The Origins of the Internet’”

Chris has been leading engineering teams since 1999. He was pivotal in the BBC’s adoption of Agile in 2000-2001. Since then he has worked for broadcasters and platform owners including Dish Network in the US and Deutsche Telekom in Europe. He is currently Vice President, Engineering at Linius Technologies. He is an active member of the Lean/Agile/DevOps community speaking at Meet Ups and conferences across Europe including GOTO Berlin, Agile Cambridge, CukeUp and QCon. His favourite language is Python.