We talked to Matteo Emili, the head of Software Engineering at Avanade UK and Ireland, and one of the speakers at JAX London 2022 and DevOpsCon London 2023, about his work and his area of expertise. Here’s what he’s passionate about and why he’s one of our distinguished speakers.

devmio: Hello Matteo, and thank you for taking the time to answer our questions! First of all, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Matteo Emili: My pleasure. I am the Head of Software Engineering at Avanade UK and Ireland, as well as a Microsoft MVP for Azure DevOps and GitHub. I am a passionate Agile advocate, a technologist at heart, and a cloud architect who is interested in leveraging technology as a tool for transformation and continual development. I like driving tangible change.

devmio: Your session at JAX London 2022 was titled “What Did it Mean Bringing Inner Source to an Enterprise?” Could you tell us more about what an inner source is? What are its use cases?

Matteo Emili: Inner source, in a nutshell, is about bringing open-source development practices inside a corporate framework. By enabling development teams to share their codebases and accept contributions from other teams within an organisation, it helps organisations on their journey to engineering excellence. There are several use cases, ranging from code reuse to platform development. However, inner source generally promotes greater overall quality of codebases within a company and allows the best aspects of their products to emerge from the bottom up.

devmio: What are Pipelines as Code and how do they relate to configuration management?

Matteo Emili: Pipelines as Code do not necessarily mean configuration management, however, they can power its adoption extensively. Pipelines are repeatable in nature, hence they can incorporate steps which will run against an application to set (or reset) its configuration. They are a flexible tool which can do many things.

devmio: What benefits will teams experience from migrating to using Pipelines as Code?

Matteo Emili: Developers will treat Pipelines as Code like any application code — hence versioning, peer reviews, automations, and testing are all important benefits which are impossible to achieve with UI-based definitions.

What’s also important to remember is that pipeline definitions will then live in the repository, alongside application code and other automations. This will make repositories fully portable as there will be no external dependency on the definition itself.

Collaboration is at the heart of the inner source story I delivered during the session.

devmio: Are there any common hurdles that teams may experience with Pipelines as Code? Or are there any potential downsides that they should be aware of?

Matteo Emili: A major hurdle is usually the migration from the UI-based definitions to the "as code" version. This is usually solved by using the tools available in your build engine to allow a conversion as well as migrating definitions in a way that makes sense to the team. There are no downsides, to the contrary quite the contrary; since all engines are moving in the same direction, Pipelines as Code are becoming the new standard.

devmio: Could you share a collaborative success story that you and your team experienced? What lessons did you learn from this?

Matteo Emili: Collaboration is at the heart of the inner source story I delivered during the session. A team that formed during the pandemic, which was entirely geo-distributed and with the goal of promoting technical excellence, was able to push collaboration to its limit and produce amazing achievements.

Even though they have doubled in size, the original team's essential principles and original vision have not changed.

devmio: Finally, what are your most essential open-source software tools that you recommend all DevOps teams use?

Matteo Emili: I am a big fan of Jinja for automatic documentation generation. Markdown-generated Docs as Code is something we tend to use a lot.

Checkov is another tool I am really fond of — it scans Infrastructure as Code for security issues.

However, generally speaking, I would recommend using anything that improves a part of the development platform!

devmio: Thank you for the interview! Matteo is scheduled to deliver a talk titled "What Did It Mean Bringing Inner Source in an Enterprise?" at DevOpsCon London 2023. Be there or be square!