What My Dad taught Me about ChatOps

My dad once told me about a guy from Birmingham, a martial artist who’d learned tai-kwon-do, who could do jujitsu and would box.

Now, in his wisdom he devised his own style of martial arts, the principle was simple, if you couldn’t do it in a phone booth, it was no good to you in a pub fight.

With two paragraphs about Birmingham, kung-fu and pub fights you might be wondering how this could ever have anything to do with practical DevOps.

Introducing ChatOps, and here’s the tag line, when you’re in the pub, down the gym or stuck on a plane to New York, what’s the maximum you can do from just your phone.

We don’t all lug around a laptop 247 and I know I don’t always have a handbag big enough for mine, so if your production environment was burning down, and all you had was your phone, data and slack, could you save it all?



Aubrey Stearn


Head of DevOps @ Arcadia Group

