DeliveryConf

Ken: [00:00:00] I don’t think hardly anything that we call AI is AI, so I’m just going to say it’s all machine learning.

Matty: It’s time for Arrested DevOps, the podcast where we help you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and optimize your team and organization for maximum DevOps awesomeness. I’m your host, Matt Stratton, @MattStratton on Twitter, and I’ve got a couple of really great guests to talk about kind of a new interesting conference. But before we get into that, a word from our sponsors. Arrested DevOps is brought to you by PagerDuty. In an always-on world, teams trust PagerDuty to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers every time. With PagerDuty, teams spend less time reacting to incidents and more time building for the future. From digital disruptors to Fortune 500 companies, over 12,000 businesses rely on PagerDuty to identify issues and opportunities in real time, and bring together the right people to fix problems faster and prevent them from happening again. PagerDuty. Solutions before problems. DevOps shows that delivery automation is important. Our work is changing software, and software is useful after it’s delivered. So how do we develop our delivery? Is it scattered across dozens of repos? Or could we use code? Is it a loose collection of YAML and Bash? Or can we unit test our delivery too? Do we even need all those pipelines? There is a better way. When you’re tired of patching up pipelines, when you’re serious about safe delivery of code, check out Atomist at atomist.com.

[00:01:42] The worst thing about the Arrested DevOps podcast is when it ends. You’re left wondering what to do next. What are you going to listen to on your commute home? How do you occupy your time when walking the dog? What are you going to listen to during the quarterly all-hands meeting? But fear not, dear listener, there is a solution. You need to subscribe to Software Defined Talk right now. It’s a weekly podcast that recaps all the news in cloud computing, DevOps, and enterprise software. The hosts, Cote, Matt Ray, and Brandon Wichard, will keep you up to date on all things cloud while offering tips on how to optimize your Costco haul, and how to PowerPoint. It’s a fun, free-flowing conversation that will keep you entertained and informed. What are you waiting for? Subscribe to the podcast today by visiting softwaredefinedtalk.com or by searching for Software Defined Talk in your favorite podcast app. So yeah, joining me today are 2 of the organizers of a brand new conference we’re going to all hear about. But before we start talking about the conference, uh, guests, could you introduce yourselves and Tell us a little bit about who you are.

Sasha: [00:02:51] Sure. I’m Sasha Rosenbaum. I am a Program Manager on the Azure DevOps team at Microsoft. Me and Matt used to work together a long, long time ago, so we’re still friends.

Ken: Cool. I’m Ken Mugrage. I’m a Technology Advocate at ThoughtWorks, which is just an easy way to say I work on DevOps continuous delivery. I also organize some of the DevOps Days Seattle.

Matty: Sasha and I also organize DevOps Days Chicago. So we’ve got a bunch of conference organizers. Again, before we dig into that, we’re here to talk about something called DeliveryConf, a brand new conference that’s happening for the first time.

Sasha: When?

Matty: Where? Tell us some details, and then let’s talk about what it really is.

Ken: Sure. It’s January 21st and 22nd in Seattle. We wanted to choose something that wasn’t the heavy conference time, in a city where we probably won’t have snow. It’s coming up soon.

Matty: [00:03:52] Tell me a little bit about what is DeliveryConf. There’s lots of different conferences. What’s the focus of this event?

Sasha: As we mentioned, a lot of our organizer team are part of various DevOps Days in different cities. The one gap that we saw at DevOps Days was that we continued to have non-technical conversations. And part of it is because the audience is really diverse at DevOps Days. So you don’t know if people are dev or ops or PMs or stuff like that. And part of it is because it’s an open source event, so we don’t want to endorse products, so we don’t want to deep dive into technology. But then you kind of get out of DevOps Days and you’re like, okay, I have all these amazing ideas, but I have not seen anybody do any, implementation of stuff, and I haven’t learned how to actually do things.

Ken: There’s no such thing as a conference these days that doesn’t have a DevOps track, for example. But they all say, do security testing, not, here’s how we did security testing on this specific project in this specific way. So, it’s really not deep enough because it’s a polyglot conference, it’s not so forth. So, we looked around and there really weren’t any continuous delivery conferences. There were DevOps conferences, there were language conferences, but not CD conferences.

Matty: [00:05:21] Right. So, that’s the focus of DeliveryConf, is thinking about how we’re shipping software and using the principles of continuous delivery, but in the nuts and bolts of how we actually do that. Right. Correct.

Sasha: Then the other thing I want to add is we are aiming not to be specific to any particular vendor. So, that will give a chance to people to come in and showcase their products and their techniques and what they do at their companies. And kind of you can contrast and compare, hey, you know, that product or that technology works better for me or has better features and stuff like that.

Matty: So that’s why I wanted to kind of, yeah, get my arms around because just sort of saying like we needed a conference with more technical content is kind of general, but it’s more, it’s around this idea of more technical implementation products, But, like, the how-to, the examples, and not even the hand-wavy examples, if I understand correctly, but the actual implementation detail, again, about actually shipping software.

Ken: [00:06:23] Yeah. I’ll pick on myself. I do talks all the time that are at a very high level of, hey, you have to do organizational change and create a pipeline and possibly re-architect, etc. And it talks about, like, the importance of security is everybody’s responsibility. And you should do compliance testing. But again, I don’t know the tech stacks in the audience, I don’t know what have you, and so I can’t get— plus 30 minutes, you can’t get deep on that. Our hope is with Delivery Conf, and the CFP actually closes tonight, but we have a pretty good idea what the program is going to look like. The hope is that what was 5 minutes in my talk is going to now be a 30-minute talk on how we did compliance on this specific project.

Matty: Got it. So, who should be coming to this conference?

Ken: That’s always a hard question. It’s definitely hands-on practitioners because, again, we’re going to get into the details. But also, I’m sure we’ll get into it, we have a little bit of a unique format. So, frankly, even people like product managers in the continuous delivery space, they’re going to be seeing information that they’re not seeing anywhere else.

Matty: [00:07:39] Okay, so yeah, let’s go into that. So tell me the format, right? Because we all— and what’s interesting is, you know, depending who you talk to, they’re like, well, this is how conferences look, and then they all look different, right? So you say your unique format. What is this format? How does it look? What’s the experience of attending this conference going to be like?

Sasha: So, and we’re starting something new, so we’ll see how it works out. But We all love open spaces and we love the discussions that happen in those rooms, and we think a lot of good stuff comes out of the ability to have a conversation as opposed to just listening passively to a talk. But we wanted to take it kind of to the next level and make it first-class content, right? So we’re gonna have these discussions after each talk for 20 minutes, and we’re gonna record the discussion. And so we’re going to use it as a means for people who could not attend the conference or who want to refresh that material in their head to be able to go and listen to that content as well.

Matty: [00:08:39] So it’s kind of merging Q&A with open spaces in a structure. I know I’m oversimplifying, but I’m thinking about like having that ability where after I see a talk, I might have things to talk about, right?

Ken: Right.

Matty: And usually maybe some are— because having a conversation with the speaker is not an appropriate thing to do during Q&A, right?

Ken: Also, you just brought up an interesting point. The conversation is not with the speaker, right?

Matty: That’s right. Yeah.

Ken: So in our format, there’s a 30-minute talk, but then we want to take the speakers off the pedestal. And I say that as someone who speaks for a living.

Matty: Yeah.

Ken: Okay. The speaker can certainly participate. They also can choose not to. And but then what we want to talk about is going to be— it’s going to be facilitated because it’s only 20 minutes. But we’re going to tell people, okay, for this topic, not this talk, this topic, you know, what challenges do you have? What successes have you had that you can share with the group? And then it’s a little bit of a silly question, but if you had the magic wand, what would you want to see, whether it be product or culture or whatever, in the next 2 to 5 years to make this easier for you? And so, you know, what, what what people are working on that’s worked is going to help people. And then I think for the market, if we can talk about what we need to enable these things, it’s like, okay, yeah, you can tell me how you did compliance checks, but my compliance team’s in a different country. Okay, what do I need to help enable that automation in the future? And that’s where we’re trying to like shape the future with these conversations.

Sasha: [00:10:10] And I will also add, so you mentioned this, right? When we do Q&A, we usually say, hey, Q&A is not for arguing with the speaker, it’s for asking questions, right? But then Some people might actually have a need to have a discussion or propose different opinions or say, hey, it wouldn’t work for me because X, Y, and Z, but I want to see someone in here who has different suggestions. So this is the goal for these discussions. And also we said it was going to be 20 minutes because this, you know, time is limited, but we will have rooms where you can sort of take it offline and continue the conversation. Um, and keep talking about the subject.

Matty: Okay. So, um, you know, Ken, you, you meant, and again, I’m still kind of wanting to kind of tee up some thoughts around the content and then kind of maybe dig into what some of the areas might be. And I know you can’t give it away, but, um, so you’ve gotten, you, you say you’re working on your program. I think you have a few speakers announced. So could you share who are at least some of the folks you know are going to be presenting And maybe why I want to come listen to them.

Ken: [00:11:20] Sure. So, I mean, part of it is we have a, maybe a little bit cliché, but a little tagline that is, you know, learning from today and shaping tomorrow. So, from the learning from today, our opening keynote is Jez Humble and Dave Farley, who are the co-authors of the book Continuous Delivery, which has its 10-year anniversary next year, which is also part of our timing of how we were going to do this. And so, we are literally gonna kick off the Continuous Delivery Conference with the people who wrote the book Continuous Delivery. Now, they would be the first to tell you, they just wrote it down, they didn’t invent all the things, but that’s who’s gonna kick it off. And then, some techniques that aren’t brand new, but are key to fast delivery and so forth, things like feature toggles, we have Heidi Waterhouse from LaunchDarkly who’s gonna come speak. So, talking about some of those things that are new. Stuff that we haven’t announced yet, so don’t want to quite give it away. There’s a couple that we’re looking at that are machine learning in a continuous delivery in a pipeline environment, and they’re doing pipelines for ML that are really, really interesting. A couple of hands-on things with security and so forth. Then we’re also going to do a panel that we have some pretty big names that I definitely can’t talk about yet that are going to— on the second day, so we have the kickoff on the first day is the book. The second-day kickoff is gonna be a panel of executives or that kind of experience level, at least, saying, what’s CD gonna be in the future? What do we need to see from a business perspective and a technical perspective to make this make sense long-term?

Matty: [00:12:57] So, do you think if I’m someone who is not actively practicing continuous delivery in my organization today, is this valuable for me to attend, or is this for someone who’s trying to hone their craft? What’s the kind of experience level that you’re thinking is good for attending this conference?

Ken: Yeah, it probably is closer to hone your craft. It’s probably not— if you’re not familiar with overall CD concepts, to be honest with you, you probably aren’t gonna see that session there.

Sasha: Right. And I think, you know, if you’re just starting out, maybe DevOps Days is a better conference to go to. But if you’re sold on the ideas but you’re trying to implement them, and in particular, we’re hoping, and I don’t know that we’re gonna be 100% able to accomplish that, but we were hoping to kind of close the gaps on some of the things that people kind of don’t talk about. So everybody talks about continuous delivery for code because it’s really easy, right? But not a lot of people talk about continuous delivery for databases. And this is a big, big topic, and you can’t really continuously deliver your entire software application application if you’re not able to continuously deliver your database. So, it’s stuff like that.

Ken: [00:14:11] Yeah.

Matty: I kind of want to talk about why it’s important to me to be talking about this event on the show. Why are we talking about it? This is not paid programming, by the way. This is not a 30-minute commercial for DeliveryConf. But I’m really interested in this, and I think it’s interesting to the audience for a couple of different reasons. One is the topic area. We’ve been talking about CI/CD, and we’re talking about continuous delivery and delivering software. For, again, literally like almost 10 years, right? You know, and was early episodes of the show, you know, uh, kind of our joke was like, how many episodes do you have to have in before you can have Jez on the show? The answer, by the way, is 11, I think. Um, now I’m gonna be not sure. No, I think it was we had to have 11 episodes before we could ask Jez to be on the show. I think it was a few more until he, until he actually got on. But because it, it’s a, it’s a foundational idea and They’re not necessarily a 100% Venn diagram circle of DevOps and continuous delivery. They’re connected. So, that’s an important thing to bear in mind, right? But they’re so connected, and I think having a conference, because we’ve been talking about this for a long time, in kind of not tangential even, but it’s just sort of always there, but it hasn’t been the forefront of 2 whole days about just that. So I think that’s pretty cool. Um, I’m also interested to think about this topic in general over however many years we’ve been doing this, you know, which sounds like a lot but it’s really not, you know. And by us, I mean those of us sitting on the show. What have you been seeing? Because we, we’re in this space professionally one way or another, right? Like, you both literally work on these products, right, that people are using. I used to. Now I’m in a different world. But so what, what, what’s different? Like, what, what’s the, what’s the state of the art? And by state of the art, I don’t mean like what’s the most advanced thing, but what, what state is the art in, right? Like, where are we at?

Ken: [00:16:21] So I think we’re at a real crossroads because There’s a focus right now on speed of delivery from, you know, how code commit to production, how long did it take? And my pipeline took 3 minutes, and mine took 12, and mine took what have you. And while I certainly understand, especially in the world of microservices and new architectures, where that’s possible, it’s not possible to have done compliance checks, and security checks, and all of those things on a 3-minute pipeline. So, with this really weird thing where, you know, I work for a vendor, and vendors and others are coming out with these tools where, oh, we’re gonna give the developer, all they have to do is write a few lines of YAML, and boom, they’re on Kubernetes in production. And that’s okay. But, like, if you look at the focus, or I’m sorry, the definition of continuous delivery that Jez wrote that’s on continuousdelivery.com, it specifically says safely. Into, okay. So, I think sometimes we sacrifice what the industry right now is saying, oh, it’s about fast, fast, fast, fast, fast. I was really happy to see DORA, the DevOps Resource and Assessment, now says on-demand is there, and often mains many times per day, but it’s the ability to deploy anytime.

Matty: [00:17:40] I always like to say that it’s, I think, and you kind of went into this, but like the way it says, it’s not about as fast as possible, it’s as fast as you need it to be.

Ken: Yes.

Matty: Right. And, and we, we tend to do this, right? We catch on to the wrong thing, or maybe not even the wrong thing, but also the thing that’s easy to understand and also easy to measure. Right. Easy to measure. But, but we, we want to have like this state of done, like there’s a number we want to have. And the funny thing is, I’m going to go down this weird analogy, but like I always say, like I want to see that number just getting better. It’s not getting to a certain number. Um, and then it’s interesting because I also will tell people you have to have a metric you’re trying to hit on certain things. And I used to make the joke that I had a, you know, I worked for an e-commerce company and I used to put together dashboards on site performance. And after doing it for a couple months, just basically fundamentally doing it, turning it to my boss who brought it up to the board, and then I was like, well, we’re trying to make decisions based on this. And I was like, what’s good? And she said, not slower than last month. And I’m like, okay, but like, but what does that, you know, what does that mean? But I think in some cases, not slower than last month is good because you’re showing improvement. But at a certain point, you can also— that number might stop improving because you might get to what is appropriate, right? And it’s, is it the thing that’s getting in your way, right? And again, those metrics are about How do you measure the business value of your ability to deploy on demand?

Ken: [00:19:13] I think what you’re actually measuring is not the business value of deploying on demand, it’s the business value of the thing you deployed and how quickly you can react to that. What I mean by that is, you design or you have a theory, scientific method. I have a theory that if I do this in my application, it’s going to cause my sales to go up. And I wanna be able to get that to production in a certain amount of time, and that you can measure. And then I wanna measure that for a certain amount of time and say, did my business go up or down? And this is where I think machine learning and, you know, I don’t think hardly anything that we call AI is AI, so I’m just gonna say it’s all machine learning. But it would be really cool now, what if your pipeline could learn that, hey, when you do this on that part of the code, it adds this thing. If you do this on that part, then we can see if the business went up and down, and if it did, we can automatically kill the canary. You know, or what have you.

Sasha: It’s also— so the other thing that happens, I think, in the industry is that not everybody is in the same boat, but we like to pretend that everybody is, you know what I mean? And people have different compliance requirements and totally different software that they’re based on and different levels of legacy. And I don’t even like the word legacy because like, hey, this is software that’s making money for you.

Matty: [00:20:31] You’re supposed to say heritage systems now. Right.

Sasha: Heritage systems. So, not everybody is a startup who can just be on Netlify and deploy straight to production. And so, we kind of like to omit that complexity from decision-making sometimes. And I want to bring it back in and discuss it and talk to real practitioners in real companies who are implementing these things and ran into problems and solved the problems and so on.

Matty: I think another thing, and again, this is me thinking on my incident response service restoration hat, is we always are framing this conversation around continuous delivery around getting some new feature out there, but also restoring, right? Like, like we, because what we don’t want to do is we don’t want to fix things, so to speak, or restore service in a way that’s bypassing our usual checks as much as possible. Sometimes we might have to do that, right? And by the way, that’s okay because you just have to, you know, we make our decisions differently in an incident, but wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to, right? You know, if we thought about it in that same way where we’re measuring business value, but also, is this the way when we’re able to Again, it’s that on demand. It’s, it’s that I can, I have a need, I have a business need to get some change out there. And it might be so that I can understand, is this going to sell more widgets? Or also I have a business need to get this out there because people can’t sign up for my service right now.

Ken: [00:22:08] Yeah.

Matty: And you, because the form’s broken, right?

Ken: You know, you bring up a really important point. You know, I, I, I kind of poo-pooed on, you know, I have a 2-minute pipeline. But the truth is, the most recent team I was on, our pipeline itself, when it went through all the security checks and everything, was fairly long. But it had a short circuit where in an emergency, in an incident response, in a what-have-you, we still had the basic unit tests and the fast tests that ran, gave us the installer, and then a person with the right level of permissions or whatever you wanna put it could click a button and it’s in production. And then the rest of the pipeline tailed that. And so, it is important to have a way for incident response to have your pipeline, not a human or not some other system, but your pipeline, push that fix to production. But it’s okay if that’s not the normal path, as long as it’s, you know what I mean? It’s the same pipeline, you’re just skipping things in an emergency.

Matty: What are your, you know, you kind of talked about, but like, we’re talking about measurement is important. Goal, you know, metrics are important. And maybe these aren’t, you know, I’m not necessarily talking about something quantifiable, but more than just, I want to do a different conference. What are your goals? Right. You kind of said that the goal was because there’s this gap, but like concretely, how will, how are you going to measure success of DeliveryCon?

Ken: [00:23:31] Oh boy, that’s a tough question. Um, so go ahead.

Sasha: Yeah, okay, thoughts? Yeah, and interesting if we’re gonna, you know, agree or not. Um, I, I feel like, you know, every time we do something for the community, it is to improve people’s lives. Like, it— like, I know this sounds cliché and it sounds like too high level and, and whatever, but I mean, like, that’s why we do what we do, right? Um, and I think that the fact that we’re sharing— like, I love to see the light bulbs go on in people’s head and, and for someone to be like, oh my God, this totally solves my problem, right? Or, oh my God, like, I’ve been struggling with this for 5 months, I can’t find an answer anywhere, and you’re in the same boat, and now we can talk and share experiences, maybe solve this problem, right? It’s, it’s always about, like, people not being alone in their experience, right? And also being able to learn something new from somebody else.

Ken: Yeah. So, I actually do have a hard metric. So, Sasha hinted at it earlier where the conversations after each talk are first-class artifacts. So, at most conferences, you have the talks, and then you have open space or hallway or what have you, but those aren’t recorded. Only the attendees get to benefit from that. For us, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna have people come up to the stage, around the stage, and we’ll have space. And we’re going to use like a microphone as a totem. And we’re going to record those conversations. And those are going to be published as first-class artifacts. So you’re going to have not only have the talks on YouTube or whatever, we haven’t chosen a publishing platform, but also then the actionable discovery. And my metric is I would love to see that get at least as much traffic as the videos. I would love to— if people are listening to what did— what were the conversations that were had, and what are the problems these folks are having, and what are the successes they’re having? If they’re listening to that as much as they’re listening to, you know, Fortune 500 retailer talking about their delivery process, I think that’s success.

Sasha: [00:25:33] And, you know, it’s an interesting thing because, like, if you listen to, like, videos of recorded talks, you rarely have reactions to them. But, like, if you listen to a podcast, how many times do you start participating in that conversation and like having opinions on that. So, so that’s kind of like bringing people into this conversation. By the way, you’re gonna have a choice, so you don’t have to participate in the recorded discussion because obviously not everybody wants to be recorded. But if you want to participate in it, you, you can totally be a part of it.

Ken: And on that note, these are audio-only recordings. We’re not— because not everybody wants to be in the picture and so forth, and we want to respect people’s privacy.

Matty: What has been, um, the response so far as you’ve been talking about this event with all kinds of folks? I’m going to leave that open-ended when I say what’s been, what’s been the reaction, what’s been the response so far.

Ken: You know, it’s been very positive in the conversations I’ve had. I mean, the challenge we have is it is a brand new format, it’s a different way of doing it and so forth. And so, um, when we have, when we have the opportunity to have conversations, people are like, oh, that’s really I wanna be part of that. I’m excited about that. But admittedly, we’re a not-for-profit. We’re backed by DevOps Days Seattle, which is a nonprofit, but we don’t have money to go out there and spend like a big commercial conference does doing promotions. So, the people have been excited, but I’m glad for things like this to also help get the word out.

Sasha: [00:26:58] We’ve had a very positive reaction, and it’s a different thing because We’re kind of used to doing DevOps Days, and DevOps Days has a huge brand. Even, say, 6 years ago when we first started doing these things, it already had a name. And this is interesting because now when I hear people who don’t know I’m involved in this tell me, like, oh, it looks like a really solid conference and they want to be there, I’m like, oh my God, this is amazing. We’re actually hitting the mark on something.

Matty: We mentioned CFP is closing. So by the time you’re listening to this, sorry, maybe next year. Um, but what are, you know, uh, tickets are available?

Ken: Yes, tickets are available.

Matty: Um, how does someone acquire these tickets?

Ken: You can go to deliveryconf.com. There’s a register. Uh, if you use, uh, uh, what was it called? Uh, ADO, I think is what the one we made. If you use ADO, you get a 10% off discount.

Matty: Very nice.

Ken: Uh, I have to admit it is a little more expensive than most community-based, not-for- profit events, because we’re going to have 3 tracks and all the recordings, our AV costs are much higher. So if I remember right, it’s $400, $450 for a ticket. That said, if you’re in a position where you’re not able to come because purely for financial reasons, please do at least reach out. We’ve heard from some sponsors they may be interested in sponsoring folks that can’t make it otherwise.

Matty: [00:28:19] And speaking of sponsors, sponsorships are available?

Ken: Sponsorships are also available. Um, something—

Matty: why would somebody sponsor this conference?

Ken: Yeah, so also it’s also there at deliveryconf.com.

Matty: No, I said why.

Ken: Also how. How? Go to deliveryconf.com.

Matty: But now Ken’s going to tell you why. Yeah, you should do that.

Ken: So the why, um, a couple things. So first off, remember we talked— again, it’s the format, so the discussions. And so what I’m telling sponsors is, you know, like, like a lot of the community-based conferences, the practitioner-based conferences, you know, bring engineers. Don’t just bring sales staff. Nothing against sales staff, but bring engineers. For this one, also bring product managers, people that are gonna, you know, because it’s like a paid focus group after every talk. So they’re gonna be able to hear lots of things that people are wanting and so forth. The other thing we’re doing—

Sasha: yeah, we’re including a sponsored talk with gold sponsorship, and we still have a couple of gold sponsorships left. So maybe we still do when you listen to this. And the reason for that is, so we don’t want to include sort of straight-up product pitches, but we do want technical talks. And so it makes sense to us that a product owner from a sponsor would want to walk us through, you know, a deep technical level on how they do things or what their product does.

Ken: [00:29:37] Yeah.

Matty: So as an attendee, if you’re having these sponsors, are you providing some guidance to sponsors around Most definitely.

Ken: What we’re saying is, um, we want to see how you solve this specific problem, hopefully on a specific client, you know, or what have you. And, and the fact that we want deep technical means you have to— it has to be a tool. You can’t really say— and you could do this with other— I mean, you know, so to some extent, um, the sponsors have to submit their decks to us 2 weeks in advance so that we can review them and make sure that they’re not a pitch and so forth. The content will be the same quality as all the other content. You know, I can tell you, I have always had a gut reaction to sponsor talks, you know, and I’ve given sponsor talks, frankly. And there’s always that, oh, I’m just going to go in and see the same deck they would give if the salespeople came. It’s definitely not going to be that, but it’s going to be, you know, it’s going to be vendors or their customers or whoever they want to put in there, frankly, that is talking about solving a real problem. We’re not gonna require live coding from anybody, but we wanna see real solutions to problems.

Matty: [00:30:40] Are there any other things that you want people to be aware of? ’Cause we’re getting, as we’re kind of wrapping up here, any other things that we need to think about when we’re talking about either the conference or also these technologies, these approaches? What are some of the things to keep in mind?

Sasha: I don’t know if this is a hard topic for me, but, you know, we looked at some study that said that only 3% women identify as technical folks in the Dev/CICD space. I mean, and just looking at our effort to get diverse CFP, it’s proving right. It’s really hard to find non-male speakers and practitioners in this space, even though we reached out personally to a lot of people. So, I want to invite all sort of diverse folks, not overrepresented folks to the conference. And I want to invite you to be on stage if you want to be, um, and to, you know, be a participant in the conference.

Matty: [00:31:46] Fantastic. Well, uh, Ken and Sasha, thank you for, for joining me here. Um, everybody, listeners, so remember, go to deliveryconf.com. The discount code ADO will get you 10% off. It’s fantastic. Ken told me he is personally paying that 10% out of his own pocket. Maybe, I don’t know. I don’t know how money works. I’ve only run an event for 6 years. And again, if you’re interested in sponsoring, it seems like it’d be a great event for sponsors, especially in this space. I’m excited to see how this event plays out. We’re seeing, I think, a lot of experimentation in this, in in saying, let’s do conferences a little different, right? Because we’ve learned, right? You know, we’ve run events and they’re great and we continue to run them that way, right? Because they do what they need. But then how can we kind of turn things around? And I think it’s really interesting and exciting to have this focus. Like, again, we’ve been talking for 10 years about why you should do CD and the theories behind it. But yeah, having this opportunity, so I encourage you to check out DeliveryConf. You know, we’ll have some links in the show notes. To some supporting stuff, or just go to deliveryconf.com and find out all the information. Again, remind us, it’s January 21st and 22nd. January 21st and 22nd of 2020. If you’re listening to this episode in the future, don’t get confused. We’re talking about the first ever Delivery Conf, which is taking place in 2020. So again, Ken and Sasha, thanks for joining me. This was great, great conversation. Ken, have you been on the show before?

Ken: [00:33:23] I don’t think so.

Matty: I don’t think you have. Sasha’s been on a whole bunch of times, but, you know, Ken, I think we somehow managed to, you know, let you skate away, but we got you this time. So, yeah, so go to arresteddevops.com/deliveryconf to check out the show notes. We’ll have kind of interesting supporting links and things. If you go to arrestedevops.com/itunes, you can leave us a review in the iTunes store, which, believe it or not, actually does help people find the show. And if you leave us an interesting one, we might read it on the air. I guess we call the podcast being on the air. If you’re into Spotify and iHeartRadio, you can find us there now too, which is pretty cool. Subscribe to us on whatever your favorite device and platform is. You can probably find us. And as always, I’m Matt, @MattStratton on Twitter, and this is Arrested DevOps. And remember, there’s always DevOps in the banana stand.