Heidi Waterhouse
where else to find them
website:http://heidiwaterhouse.com
github:wiredferret
bluesky:wiredferret.bsky.social
linkedin:heidiwaterhouse
what they talk about
all 19 in the filters
where they keep going back
- Devopsdays Boston3 editions2016–2019
- RubyConf3 editions2015–2020
- Open Source Bridge3 editions2013–2015
all 31 in the filters
on a stage with
- Adam Zimmanonce
- Aniela Crisanonce
- Antonio Verardionce
all 5 in the filters
who talks about the same things
- Russ Miles22 talks
- Matt Stratton30 talks
- Kerri Miller19 talks
- John Willis31 talks
- Hila Fish32 talks
- Jason Yee30 talks
| title | conference | date |
|---|---|---|
| Progressive Delivery | Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit 2025 | 2025-09-23 |
Progressive delivery argues that shipping faster is not enough and claims decoupling building from user-facing change reduces the “jerk” that breaks workflows… | ||
| Documentation and AI: How to write right now | LDX3 London 2025 | 2025-06-16 |
AI excels at crawling and extracting and indexing 80GB corpora, templating predictable outputs like security release notes and SDK translations, and doing… | ||
| The 7 Battles of Software Architecture: How to Protect Your Project! | Software Architecture Gathering – Digital 2023 | 2023-11-27 |
Seven concrete early decisions prevent huge rework: use reference labels for localization (one startup’s hack forces 5 days vs 2 weeks of fixes for… | ||
| Dark Matter and Deep State: The Unseen Majority of Everything | SREcon23 Europe/Middle East/Africa | 2023-10-10 |
Argues that the infrastructure people never notice are the consequential majority: mundane rules that make the conference stairs safe, the Apollo 13… | ||
| No pitch hot | Write the Docs Portland 2023 | 2023-05-07 |
A clear claim: a pitch wins only by shrinking the gap between how much the pitcher cares and what the listener wants. Concrete tools: watch cues like glazed… | ||
| Docs for Developers: How to start when everything is hard | apidays Paris 2021 | 2021-12-07 |
Practical steps for getting usable API docs: gather loose documentation from tickets, wikis, runbooks, then triage and connect what’s current; scope work to… | ||
| All the World's A Staging Server | Reliable Web Summit 2021 | 2021-08-26 |
Claim: maintaining an identical staging environment is impossible so teams staging is a lie and should instead deploy into production while hiding work with… | ||
| Kitchen Practical and Coding Practices | PyOhio 2021 | 2021-07-31 |
Lillian Moller Gilbreth measures that an Edwardian kitchen forces two miles to bake a cake, and she invents conveniences like wall switches and foot‑operated… | ||
| Our Mill City | devopsdays Minneapolis 2021 | 2021-07-20 |
Twin Cities history becomes a systems lesson: at one point 30 sawmills and eight prosthetic factories cluster on Saint Anthony Falls, and a flour mill… | ||
| The Future Should Be Uneven | RubyConf 2020 | 2020-11-17 |
Argues for concrete steps: make accessibility cross-browser and bandwidth-aware, supply persistent customization so keyboards (Dvorak) and input preferences… | ||
| Opening Keynote: MirrorWorld | PyConline AU 2020 | 2020-09-04 |
Keynote argues that Pythonistas already build practical civic infrastructure and must scale it: PyData and Jupyter for accessible statistics, the responsible… | ||
| Designing effective OKRs | LeadDev Live 2020 | 2020-04-07 |
OKRs work when they state a concrete claim, show how it’s measured and what actually changed: 99% of requests under 300ms as an SLO‑style key result, an… | ||
| All The World’s A Staging Server | DevOpsDays Chicago 2019 | 2019-08-27 |
Claim: staging is a lie because production is unknowable; duplication is expensive and brittle so the alternative is to deploy widely but hide exposure using… | ||
| Deploying Radically, Democratizing Release | DevOpsDays Chicago 2019 | 2019-08-27 |
Claims that release gets democratized by shipping everything and using runtime controls to decide exposure, with concrete practices: feature flags, CI/CD… | ||
| The power of positive transformation | The Lead Developer London 2019 | 2019-06-11 |
Argues that positive behavioural shaping — using immediate, chosen rewards like clicker and treats — produces repeatable change, with examples: a dog trained… | ||
| All The World’s A Staging Server | GOTO Chicago 2019 | 2019-04-29 |
Staging never matches production so the concrete recommendation is to deploy to prod behind feature flags and run dark launch experiments, canaries and… | ||
| Tinkertoys, Microservices, and Feature Management: How to Build for the Future | DevOne 2019 | 2019-04-11 |
Argues for migrating a monolith into modular microservices and using feature flags (LaunchDarkly) so containers stay stable while presentation changes, with… | ||
| Every Scar a Story | DevOpsDays Copenhagen 2019 | 2019-04-04 |
Argues that development method, version control, and deployment practice always change together and gives concrete prescriptions: move from long-lived branches… | ||
| Tinkertoys, microservices, and feature management: How to build for the future | ScaleConf 2019 | 2019-03-20 |
Argues that microservices plus feature flags require testing in production rather than full staging, with concrete practices: use canary/ring rollouts (turn on… | ||
| I Have ADD and So Can - Ooh, Shiny! | RubyConf AU 2019 | 2019-02-07 |
Claims adult diagnosis of neurodivergence reframes lifelong struggles and can make someone more effective with the right supports: medication helps manage… | ||
| Tinkertoys, microservices, and feature management... | DevOpsDays Boston 2018 | 2018-09-24 |
Claims: use feature flags to make containers stable and presentation dynamic, and to flip features on/off for cheap experiments; test channels and user flows… | ||
| Y2K and Other Disappointing Disasters: Risk Reduction and Harm Mitigation | SREcon18 Europe/Middle East/Africa | 2018-08-29 |
Y2K required thousands of engineers to edit mainframe date logic and reboot servers that sometimes never came back, and minor July outages still occurred… | ||
| Choose Your Own Deployment - Interactive Feature Flag Adventure | devopsdays Toronto 2018 | 2018-05-30 |
Interactive choose-your-own-adventure implemented in Twine walks through feature-flag patterns and operational choices, showing a kill-switch that flips in 200… | ||
| Y2K and Other Disappointing Disasters: Risk Reduction and Harm.. | ChefConf 2018 | 2018-05-22 |
Examines concrete outcomes not slogans: Y2K remediation consumes millions of dollars and thousands of person‑hours and thousands of programmers patched legacy… | ||
| The Death of Data: Risk, Retention, and Rot | NDC Minnesota 2018 | 2018-05-07 |
Argues that indiscriminate hoarding poisons machine learning and everyday lives, citing a nine‑year old job application profile that still authenticates… | ||
| Lightning Talks - Fear of the Bus: Docs and DevOps | NDC Minnesota 2018 | 2018-05-07 |
Advocates classifying all DevOps knowledge into three bins: automatable, structural, secret and automating anything scriptable so runbooks become code not long… | ||
| The Sticker Talk | Write the Docs Portland 2018 | 2018-05-06 |
Stickers matter because specific details change behavior: a recommended sticker.how size spec makes hex stickers tileable, circles force wasted space, and… | ||
| Heidi WaterHouse - DevOpsDays NYC 2018 Ignite | DevOpsDays NYC 2018 | 2018-01-18 |
Sharp, sarcastic redefinitions of common buzzwords that trade technical detail for jokes, so skip it if wanting concrete claims, tool names, metrics or… | ||
| Choose Your Own Deployment: Interactive Feature Flag Adventure | DevOpsDays NYC 2018 | 2018-01-18 |
An interactive Twine-driven demo uses launch darkly feature flags to show concrete workflows: a kill switch flips a bad feature in ~200 milliseconds versus two… | ||
| Feature Flag Foul-ups | SpringOne Platform 2017 | 2017-12-04 |
Feature flags break by refusing to switch, failing to kill runaway code, accumulating as unlabeled zombies, or being flipped accidentally; LaunchDarkly-era… | ||
| Y2K and Other Disappointing Disasters: How To Create Fizzle | RubyConf 2017 | 2017-11-15 |
A clear claim: massive prep makes disasters fizzle rather than being overblown, shown by Y2K teams who patched firmware, carted floppies and sat in war rooms… | ||
| Deploying rapidly for continuous integration | O'Reilly Velocity Conference 2017 - New York, New York | 2017-10-02 |
Deploys separate from activation using an app-level code snippet and a single control dashboard that tracks flags, supports gradual rollouts (example: 10%… | ||
| Fear of the Bus: DevOps and Docs | DevOpsDays Salt Lake City 2017 | 2017-05-16 |
Argues for concrete practices: classify documentation into three categories (critical runbooks, repeatable processes, and secrets) so teams know what to back… | ||
| Fear of the Bus | devopsdays Chicago 2016 | 2016-08-30 |
Argument: documenting ops reduces the bus factor by making knowledge discoverable. Method: force folks to add steps to one giant scrolling file, mark… | ||
| Search-First Writing for Developers | PyCon AU 2016 | 2016-08-12 |
Documentation optimized for search and built from real forum and support data cuts repeated support and speeds user success. Harvest questions from Stack… | ||
| The seven righteous fights | The Lead Developer 2016 | 2016-06-23 |
Seven concrete engineering habits: hire a localization expert for a week and never hard‑code UI strings; plan for encryption, SSL between services, data… | ||
| The Seven Righteous Fights | RubyConf 2015 | 2015-11-15 |
Seven recurring engineering fights are named and justified with concrete takeaways: build localization up front—a Brasil demo costs five days vs two weeks… | ||
| The Digital Sandwich Generation: Women's roles in ... | AlterConf Chicago 2015 | 2015-08-08 |
Claims that household digital identity work routinely falls to caregivers and gives concrete techniques: use a password vault (LastPass example) and plan… | ||
| Cassandra at the Keyboard: Whistleblowing at all scales | Open Source Bridge 2015 | 2015-06-23 |
Concrete thresholds matter: an internal docs mismatch about Docker leads to stalled features, being asked to plagiarize the AMA creates legal liability… | ||
| Life-Hacking and Personal Time Management for the Rest of Us | Open Source Bridge 2014 | 2014-06-24 |
Applies agile software practices to messy home life and shows concrete methods that work: Kanban-style boards with a two-task Kanban limit, Trello for a Trello… | ||
| Search First-Writing for non-writers | Open Source Bridge 2013 | 2013-06-18 |
Argues for search-first documentation that fixes the 80% common problems first using analytics to find pain points and a growing tag cloud for discoverability… | ||
| nothing matches | ||