Author: Dwayne McDaniel

When most people think about West Virginia, the John Dever song likely springs to mind, with the timeless words "Take me home, country road." Cybersecurity was certainly not at the top of the list of topics I associated with the "Mountain State," but that has changed now that I have met the local security community at SecureWV 2022.

A Lucky Th1rt3en Years

This year's theme was Lucky Th1rt3en, as this was the thirteenth get-together of the region's top security experts, working diligently to keep us all safe on the internet. Anyone lucky enough to attend in person saw two full days of sessions covering multiple aspects of cybersecurity, from deep dives into ransomware, to very technical talks on how malware is built, to becoming an incident responder superstar. If you didn't get the chance to attend in person, you are still in luck, as all the sessions were recorded and will be added to the SecureWV youtube channel.

I was thrilled to participate in DevOpsDays Chicago 2022 as my first in-person event as a Developer Advocate at GitGuardian. I am very excited to tell you all about this awesome event that happened from September 21 to 22 at the University of Illinois, Chicago’s The Isadore & Sadie Dorin Forum. Over 350 attendees, vendors, and volunteers gathered to take stock of the state of DevOps and share our knowledge and love of building in the cloud. 

Celebrating 8 Years of DevOpsDays Chicago 

Chicago is a city in the middle of everything, and not just geographically. It is also the home of many corporations and a vibrant technology community. DevOpsDays Chicago brought together developers, operations teams, SREs, and InfoSec leads to share their knowledge and experiences with the goal of helping us all adopt better DevOps best practices and be more secure.  

If developers all share one thing in common, it is their use of the command line to get their jobs done. Many development tools don’t come with a graphical user interface (GUI) and rely on a command line interface (CLI). There are a lot of upsides to a CLI first or only approach. Once you master the command line, you can work more efficiently than a GUI might allow and gain the awesome superpower of scripting, allowing all of your tools to start working in concert. Scripting is the bedrock for building and managing software delivery pipelines and CI/CD workflows.

However, there is nothing more intimidating, especially to a newer dev, than a blank terminal window with a blinking cursor awaiting your commands. There is no helpful UI to guide you toward your goal; you just have to know what to enter. All the burden of getting it just right falls on the developer's shoulders, and there is a lot to learn, especially when you factor in security.