American Airlines and Open Source American Airlines continues to invest in open source and expand our use in various solutions and areas of IT. Our technology stacks rely on open source in multiple ways and through different channels. We use open source as building blocks for applications, document & content management, and in the tooling that helps us automate building innovative solutions ..read more

American Airlines Tech [un]Conference 2022 We have a small, scrappy group of folks in our Product Agility space that help drive our Delivery Transformation efforts. The transformation work itself is federated out to passionate teams; however, the coordination of that transformation effort and other organizational change efforts flow through our Product Agility team ..read more

Developer Experience at American Airlines A Product Technical Lead Perspective American Airlines has been heading down the path of a technology transformation. Various groups have identified problems across American related to how our developers work on a daily basis and during the pandemic, unique opportunities arose to make the experiences easier for our application teams ..read more

The story is all too familiar. Your team is releasing their software tonight. It’s a new feature that everyone’s been waiting for. You feel good (as good as you ever do on the night of a release), and it’s been a long time coming. This new feature has been through more than enough cycles of QA, and people on the team are ready to get this thing into production ..read more

Patterns and Analogies Finding the first [patterns] and making a connection with the second [analogies] is a favorite pastime of mine. It is an art that can have a profound and effective impact when I’m communicating. As a software delivery manager, I sit at the crossroads of competing perspectives and motives, and good communication is critically important to my success ..read more

The legacy challenge… Legacy mainframe applications are usually excluded when it comes to DevOps transformation. After all, it’s a daunting task to modernize millions of lines of code written in the 1970s to the present day while the system is still monolithic. Avoiding these applications, though, can significantly hamper the effectiveness of overall IT delivery efficiency ..read more

American Airlines has always celebrated the diversity of its team members. Our IT department has weaved these values within our organizational culture. As March approached, we saw an opportunity to expand upon celebrating diversity with an emphasis on International Women’s Month. It started as an organic thought around taking an in-person celebration on International Women’s Day and pivoting it to a virtual effort ..read more

Before we get started… There’s a very real chance that some of you won’t even finish this sentence before saying “too long; didn’t read” so here’s a brief summary to try and capture your interest: TL;DR: American has been tiptoeing into the world of Open Source through our involvement in student hackathons and through our “lessons learned” from our InnerSource community ..read more

Two years ago, our organization, Customer Technology, took the first steps in embracing a product mindset by restructuring our squads around our newly developed product taxonomy. This was a huge change for our teams and, as with any change of this magnitude, not everyone was on board ..read more

Modernizing Our Infrastructure - Culture First Culture “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization” Merriam-Webster Transformations are hard but worthwhile endeavors. They require the right attitude, values, goals, and practices, all of which makes up a team’s culture ..read more