Announcements: Who's up for a scotch at InedoCon in Portland?

A couple weeks back, I posted the Free Mug Day campaign: run through the quick BuildMaster tutorial, and I'll send you a free mug. Today, I have a slightly different offer: meet me at InedoCon (Portland, May 22/23) as a TDWTF delegate, and let's chat software over scotch!

Why Portland? As part of the mug campaign, I asked everyone to share their feedback/comments/advice, and I got lots of suggestions on how we can improve the software itself. That was great, and then I saw this:

TRWTF is that I had no idea what BuildMaster actually did until now. I've seen it advertised for years, I even went to your website once or twice, but I figured it had something to do with builds and didn't really care. Anyway, I was desperate for a free mug and just gave it a try...

Well, turns out I was wrong. It's a damn useful tool and I've going to start using it to replace our existing deployment tool disaster. I guess, my main advice... perhaps say what BuildMaster actually does? We could have used this years ago. Though I wouldn't have gotten my free mug...

This wasn't the first time I've heard this sort of feedback. I originally designed BuildMaster to be very flexible, and to solve all sorts of different problems in software delivery. For a lot of customers, it did exactly that.

"Something" is better than "Everything"

Over the years, I'd proudly proclaim that "BuildMaster can do everything!" Turns out that "doing everything" may as well mean "doing nothing", and that's a problem when you're trying to sell a product. It has to "do something", and that something is called a product story. It's taken me a long time to understand that, and I learned a lot of it from TDWTF readers like you.

I'm confident my heart is in the right place. Ten years ago, I wrote that Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To, and I still believe that developers should work closely with business stakeholders to solve business problems with code. That's my vision of BuildMaster, and the other products I designed at Inedo.

Who's up for a scotch... in Portland?

If you share this vision, I'd would love to buy you a scotch and get your opinion on how we can better communicate this to the world. We're hosting our first-even user conference in Portland, and I'll be talking about how unnecessary complexity that's masquerading as innovation is stifling actual innovation.

Some of our very enthusiastic customers (and fellow TDWTF readers) will be share how they navigated this complexity, improved the lives of developers, and helped their organization as a whole:

" WebMD's Continuous Delivery Architect, Aaron Jensen will talk about how they successfully transitioned from a monolith application with no automation to a CI/CD platform with dozens of microservices using BuildMaster

" Robert Vandehey, Alkami's Vice President and Chief Architect, will show how they componentized a monolith into packages for microservices using ProGet as the key link in their deployment chain

" BuildMaster's product director John Rasch will demonstrate how you can add CI/CD to a legacy application through build, deployment, and process automation.

" Governmental organizations and other compliant-heavy industries have specific challenges for automation. Jody Dorchester will present how 100's of applications were automated with BuildMaster in less than a year, while maintaining compliance.

Even if you don't use Inedo's tools --- heck, especially if you don't use Inedo's tools --- the lessons we share will be helpful for you, and the outsider insights you have will be invaluable for everyone.

I've got three complimentary tickets for those who are interested, and a single travel voucher to cover your flight and hotel. Just fill out this form before 2019/Apr/5, and we'll be in touch.

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