2026-02-02, 15:15–15:40, D.Aud
We all have constraints, like budget, time, and resources. Dealing with them through imperfect choices results in technical debt, while learning and better technology creates opportunities for optimizations and refactors.
How can we practice dealing with these things before they cause us significant issues ?
Factory‑sim games (like Factorio, Satisfactory, and many others) might drop us on an alien world with a pickaxe and a deadline: survive long enough to research technology and build supply chains to launch stuff in space.
- Starting from scratch, we'll need to learn what tools and architecture are available to us.
- At first we'll craft things manually like we would with a CLI but that doesn't scale.
- Soon, we start automating with machines (like scripts) and eventually we automate the automators, Ansible or Terraform style.
- Then, entire factories can be packaged with clear inputs and outputs just like containerized applications.
- Before long, these factories are connected by networks of conveyor belts, drones and trains like supply chains in the middle of pipelines.
- We'll need to troubleshoot issues and identify bottlenecks with the help of observability and alerting, too.
- We might even need to defend ourselves and set up security.
Sound familiar ?
These games mirror the skills we need as engineers. In this talk, we'll explore some of these games, in order to show how they provide a fun and safe place to improve our skills in designing & building scalable systems.
David is an open source enthusiast and contributor to projects like OpenStack, Ansible, Fedora and CentOS.
iWeb, Ubisoft and RedHat alumni doing bare metal and clouds, Dev/Ops, SRE, CI/CD and everything in between at OVHcloud.
He likes simplicity and makes things work.
Greg Sutcliffe has been participating in open source communities for almost two decades, and is currently a Senior Sysadmin for Fedora. Before that, he was Community Architect and Data Scientist for Ansible, and Community Architect for Foreman.
In addition to the technical side of communities, he's also interested in the structure of communities, how people interact, and how communities achieve their aims. He's also interested in community data, and how we can use that to understand communities through a different view. He also wishes people wouldn't take averages of things they shouldn't.
He also plays far more automation games than he should.