Conference Talks
Talks I’ve given or co-presented at conferences and meetups, mostly about infrastructure, platform engineering, and distributed systems.
2025
Building Dynamic Configuration into Terraform
Amsterdam, NL • October 2022
Exposing opinionated entry points that let developers and managers update infrastructure and services without direct access to Terraform code or repositories is easier than ever with feature flags.
This talk explores the real challenges of running Terraform at scale, and how we reduced operational friction by separating configuration inputs from implementation. We’ll walk through the approach we used to move selected Terraform variables into a controlled external interface, allowing platform engineers to make targeted changes without triggering a full release or apply cycle.
Key takeaways:
- Using feature flags we can expose inputs for Terraform.
- Reduce release coupling. Decouple low-risk operational changes from full plan apply cycles.
- Platform teams own the terraform, developers/managers own the inputs based on the enterprise Feature Management’s approval flows.
Resources:
Speaking
Interested in having me speak at your conference, meetup, or company event? I’m particularly interested in topics around:
Past audiences: Engineers, engineering managers, platform teams, SRE teams, and technical leadership.
Talk formats: Conference keynotes (30-45 min), technical deep-dives (45-60 min), workshops (half-day or full-day), internal lunch-and-learns.