On June 14, more than 550 enterprise developers and industry experts came together to learn, share, and connect on the topic of Open Source. C.H. Robinson was well represented at the sold out conference, “Open Source and the Enterprise,” Open Source North with more than 20 attendees and two speakers.
The conference featured an impressive line-up of both local and national experts from companies including Target, SDG, and Magenic, GitHub, Microsoft, Elastic, and Auth0. I had the opportunity to be among the presenters at this year’s conference. I represented the Inner Source community at C.H. Robinson and shared our experience building an inner sourcing culture around open source practices and some of the common challenges enterprises face when doing so.
C.H. Robinson has been on a journey for the last several years to grow an open and collaborative Inner Sourcing culture. Building on our Inner Source model and interactions, as an example, I covered how others could address the individual vulnerability of Inner Sourcing. Creating contribution documentation, opening communication channels, and building momentum were key for us.
Challenges to Inner Sourcing also existed at the team and organizational levels. Building a strong DevOps practice has been a primary differentiator for success on our journey.
In addition to Inner Sourcing, my colleague, Enterprise Architect Jeff DeFauw, delivered a talk titled “Welcome to Production.” Jeff highlighted the use of product templates to provide architectural automation in its most natural form: code. He shared how we use automation to take a developer’s idea and a product template to deliver a brand new application to production in less than fifteen minutes.
This year, our organization, led by our DevOps team, crossed the 1,000-product mark for our deployment pipeline! That number grows every day, as we are working to “Automate Everything.”
C.H. Robinson is proud to be a part of the Minnesota tech community, volunteering, participating, and giving back at events like Open Source North. Open Source North, along with other annual Twin Cities tech events like Minnebar and DevOpsDays, show the strength of our community in the Twin Cities. It is part of the reason the Twin Cities are picking up the name “Silicon Prairie” as a technology hotbed.
Join us on our journey toward speed-to-market and contributing to the Twin Cities tech community!