James Freeman
James Freeman is a published author and Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS, bringing over 25 years of technology expertise. With more than a decade of hands-on experience, James has tackled complex enterprise challenges in real-world production environments using Ansible, often introducing this powerful automation tool to CTOs and organizations for the first time. As the author of five authoritative books on Ansible, James is a recognized thought leader in IT automation. His expertise extends to facilitating tailored Ansible workshops and training sessions, and he is a sought-after speaker, having presented at international conferences and community meetups. James's passion for empowering others through automation continues to inspire engineers and businesses to unlock new possibilities in IT.
Sessions
Ever shipped a "simple fix" at 4 PM on Friday that took down production? Felt like a genius after making Kubernetes work, only to realize six months later you understood nothing? Welcome to the beautiful, chaotic feedback loop of technology work. This talk explores how our brains betray us in the most predictable ways. You'll discover why dopamine hits from solving problems make us addicted to complexity, how the Dunning-Kruger effect means we're most confident when we know the least, and why the tech industry's rapid change keeps us perpetually cycling through peaks of "I've got this!" and valleys of "I know nothing."
For years, I was asking myself the wrong question: "Terraform or Ansible?" As if infrastructure provisioning and configuration management were the same problem. Spoiler: they're not, and trying to make one tool do both jobs is why your infrastructure code is a mess. This talk is about the liberation of discovering that OpenTofu (the Terraform fork) excels at infrastructure provisioning while Ansible owns configuration management—and that they work beautifully together when you go with the flow and use each tool for exactly what it was designed for.
Getting started with Ansible is exciting and rapidly improves your productivity. However I've revisited playbooks that I wrote almost a decade ago and found the code today to be almost unmaintainable. Should I have created a role instead of a playbook? Was it really a good idea to copy-paste between projects? (Spoiler: yes, but we've all done it somewhere!) This talk shares the practical knowledge I've gathered over years of working with Ansible—the kind of insights that only come from actually using it in production, making mistakes, and finding better approaches. In this talk, I'll share what worked, what didn't, and why—so you can build automation you'll still be happy with months down the line. You'll leave with both the fundamentals and the perspective that usually takes years to develop.
What if your entire workstation—OS configuration, installed packages, dotfiles, and secrets—lived in Git repositories? What if spinning up a perfectly configured development environment was just git clone and a reboot away? This workshop teaches you to define your computing environment entirely as code. No manual configuration. No "I think I installed this package." No hunting for that config file you tweaked six months ago. Everything—from the base operating system to your shell prompt—declared, versioned, and reproducible.