DevOpsDays 2015 Year In Review With John Willis

Matty: [00:00:00] I did an Ignite in Minneapolis, and Pete Cheslock screwed it up. I think that’s why we haven’t been at the same event or same location since then. I think he’s hiding from me. It’s time for Arrested DevOps, the podcast that helps you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and operate your team and business for maximum DevOps awesomeness. I’m your co-host, Matt Stratton, @MattStratton on Twitter.

Trevor: I’m your co-host, Trevor Hess, @TrevorGHess on Twitter.

Bridget: And I’m your co-host, Bridget Kromhout, @bridgetkromhout on Twitter.

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Trevor: [00:01:15] John Willis is joining us now. We’ve been pestering him to be on the show since practically the beginning, and now we got him. John, tell us a bit about yourself and let’s get going.

John: Yeah, you know, I think I said this to Matt a couple of times, hey, I felt that you guys didn’t like me, but then he pointed out a couple of times where I screwed up and it was my fault for not coming on, so I can’t say that this time. But yeah, no, it’s awesome to be on the show. Yeah, you know, I’m John Willis, I’m @botchagaloop on Twitter, and I think obviously been, you know, DevOps has been very dear to me, at least over the last 6 years as it has been defined, and probably the last 35 years as it’s not been defined. Mind, being kind of an IT operations junkie my whole life.

Bridget: Awesome. All right, so, John, let’s talk about— we’re here today to talk about DevOps Days, and we figured that you’re a pretty good person to talk to about this. You’ve been to a bunch of them over the years, and maybe since we’ve been telling our listeners for months and months now during all the conference and event sections of the podcast, hey, this DevOps Days has an OpenCFP, and hey, you should go to that DevOps Days, and hey, I’m going to be helping run this DevOps Days, you want to just kind of Can you give us a quick TL;DR on what is a DevOps Days?

John: [00:02:33] Yeah. Back in the early 2006, 2007, they started these things called BarCamps. I know Patrick, and somewhere there, this evolved these kind of open spaces things. We all know Patrick DeBoer. We call him the godfather of DevOps, certainly DevOps Days. He created the first one kind of by accident in that he was frustrated. That he couldn’t get velocity. He was trying to get other well-known organizations to address this opportunity of devs and ops working harmoniously or collaborating, right? He felt strong. So he ran his first DevOps Days in Ghent in, what, 2009? I was very fortunate that I happened to be listening to Andrew Schaefer on a podcast. I almost fell off the road when he mentioned agile infrastructure or agile operations. I almost got into an accident because I thought, okay. This is what my life should have been all about. I immediately called him and said, what is this Agile Operations stuff? He said, well, there’s some guy in Belgium that apparently is— I got in touch with Patrick. I think I was the only American there. To keep it short, it’s a structure of which people come to collaborate in a non-egotistical way. You find all these brilliant people. I’m not trying to say that it’s a unicorn event, but you find all these very passionate, people. The format has just worked very well. It’s usually 2 days. Some events have 1, but most have 2 days where you have morning sessions with known speakers. In fact, typically there’ll be a keynote of somebody who is kind of invited, and then there’ll be a CFP where most of the community, local and global, will try to sift through and try to present the best possible agenda. Then the afternoons are what we call open spaces where people actually get to kind of create their own topics and have open discussions and round chair circle, anywhere from a learning opportunity to an overview of a new technology to just a general discussion about some very complex items. So just to wrap it up, I remember early on for me, my career when I started out was— it was a lot of egos in my early career. I mean, you’d walk into these rooms with people who had Michelson Awards, like these performance, you know, almost medals of honor, and you couldn’t have a technical conversation with them. And all of a sudden, I’m meeting all these young, fascinating, brilliant people. I mean, it’s literally starting in 2009, 2010, and people that were just amazingly smart and passionate that seemed to, at least when you walked in the door of a DevOps day, There seemed to be no ego. Early on, I would say— I’ve done a lot of keynotes at DevOpsDays, and I always say, let’s make sure that this is not the one that changes that. Here we are, what, 6 years in, and I still get chills thinking about the conversations that I have with people. Some of the people are just amazing thinkers, and it seems like everybody checks their ego at the door. I said I’d keep it short. It’s an amazing event. If you have not been to one, there are There are plenty all over the world now. I think, Bridget, we said there’s like 22 this year. You really should find your way to one of these events. It really is fascinating. You get to meet people like Matt and Bridget and all sorts of great people.

Matty: [00:06:23] Listeners of the show have heard the story before about my transformative DevOps moment, which also involved driving in a car, listening to a podcast, which was listening to DevOps Cafe when you had Jez on, and it was the first DevOps Cafe ever listened to. And I was listening and literally yelling at the radio about how that could never work at Apartments.com and blah blah blah. And then Jez drops the whole, you know, HP LaserJet firmware story, and I went, oh. And today it’s this. So it’s, it’s, it’s kind of fun that I’m like, oh, you had a transformative podcast episode, you know, moment in your car too. So let’s make sure people don’t get into accidents. Yes, please. Hopefully we— there is an implied waiver for podcasters that we are not responsible for If you have such great big thoughts while you’re driving and listening to our thinking.

Bridget: This is a Saul of Tarsus moment that you both have. Okay. Yes. Okay. So, I’m thinking, looking at the hockey stick growth of DevOpsDays, from Ghent in 2009 to 22 events this year, what’s your— since you’ve been going since the beginning, John, what’s your 10,000-foot view perspective on how they’ve evolved? What are the changes, and how are they the same?

John: [00:07:41] I think it’s funny when you guys— we talked about doing this. It’s funny how podcasts go because you make a list of all the things you think you’re going to talk about, and then something like this comes up, which is— this question is a great question. I think one of the most interesting things to me— I mean, there are a lot of great technologies and great stories and always learning opportunities, but in the early days of DevOps, well, let’s take 2009. There was one. Right. In 2010, we basically, I think we had really 2 majors. I forget, there was one maybe in Brazil or somewhere, but in general, one in Hamburg.

Bridget: There was Sydney, Mountain View, Hamburg, and São Paulo. Yeah.

John: Yeah. And by definition, there you go. The 2 that, like, the idea was originally that, you know, where you can only, people would only tolerate 2 of these, you know, so we’ll have one in Europe. And actually, usually that was wherever Patrick had never been. Sorry, Patrick. I love you, brother. But, but you pick a city that he’d be like, Okay, where have I never been? Let’s have the Europe one. We always had the one in Mountain View or Silicon Valley because we piggybacked Velocity. But in the early days, 2010, 2011, when you got into 2012, if you asked how many people it was their first DevOps Days, there weren’t as many local ones. You would get a majority of the— a very small, maybe a third or 25% of the room would raise their hand that it was their first DevOps Days. About 2 years ago, when you asked that question, overwhelmingly it would be like 70-80% of the room would raise their hand that it was the next, and over and over. So what we’ve seen is one just really encouraging hockey stick opportunity is that we’re getting more people coming to these events. Because again, in the old days, because specifically the Silicon Valley one, you got to see all your old friends. Everybody came in. Ben Rockwood was there. John Ospar was there. I mean, you knew that in that event you were going to get— and in Europe, we got to meet Chris Byatt. It was recurring with a small group of new people. Now what you find with all the regional ones, which is great, is literally what you’re getting to meet is 75% in every event are new people. That are coming in, asking questions, and having the same kind of aha moments that we’ve all had attending our first DevOps Days.

Bridget: [00:10:05] Yeah, see, that’s, that’s great, I think, because that takes it from being, you know, old home week and fun, but also kind of an echo chamber to being an explosion of new ideas and also passing the same great ideas on to people who may not have an opportunity to have heard that before and then can take it back to their organizations. So I’m just kind of imagining like the DNA spreading throughout all of the organizations that all these people are coming from, that they can take these experiences back to.

Matty: Yeah, when it’s your local community, it’s really heartwarming to see that. You know, when it was a matter of, again, you know, we did the second Chicago one and you’re like, how many people, you know, John, you saw how many people your first time and it’s almost the whole room. And I, as an organizer, was sitting there saying, really? You guys aren’t all the people who came? Then I’m thinking, why didn’t anybody come back from last year? So it’s a whole other problem. But Minneapolis too was like that, right? You had a, and that one surprised me ’cause the community is the way it is. And when you’re part of your local community, you almost feel like you’re like, okay, well, we’re going to have a DevOps Days, and there’s going to be about 300 people there. And I know there’s about 300 people in my local community, so I know who’s going to be there. And then it’s a whole bunch of people you’ve never met before, and then it makes you feel really good. John, to your point about it, it’s spreading it out into— like Bridget said, it’s disseminating it into those organizations. And if this is the community and the city where you work, it’s very heartening. We’ve got a few Midwesterners on this podcast, and we’re a little slow. Slow to adopt in the Midwest. So it really has been powerful. John, I’ve got to say how many people I talk to who kind of found themselves coming to a DevOps Days because they went to a DevOps Enterprise Summit or something like that. So it’s interesting, the different levels. That’s something John is passionately and heavily involved in, for listeners who don’t know, who, if you only listen to the Goat Farm because you’re an enterprise person— Yeah. I mean, I love the localization, right?

John: [00:12:03] Sweet spot in my— it was, you know, it’s, it’s a little bittersweet, right? Like this year, Silicon Valley was, was decoupled from velocity and it was 80%, you know, new people. And so the bittersweet was Silicon Valley became like everywhere else. Um, and, and again, the, the localization, like, you know, Minnesota, you know, not because you’ve run it, uh, Bridget, but it was, it was, it was just a flavor of Minneapolis there, right? Having the after-party at Target and, you know, There’s a beauty in that. The bittersweet part is, in Silicon Valley, I didn’t get to meet Ben Rockwood. I didn’t get to get that little time where at least 20 minutes I got to sit and talk to Ben Rockwood about Deming.

Bridget: You probably have to go to ChefCon for that now, right?

John: There you go. There you go. Yeah, I think, again, the localization of it is really to watch the community learn about themselves. And then, and then to get the flavor of those, like Chicago, right? Like Chicago, I got to go to the Chicago one.

Bridget: [00:13:13] Deep dish DevOps. It was so deep dish DevOps.

John: Like, like, like you, you knew you were in Chicago. Like, like you could have just transported me and, you know, and just transported me like, and I’m not gonna tell you where you’re gonna wind up, John. You’re just gonna get transported and put in the room. I think within about 10 minutes, I would have figured out, you know what? I’m in Chicago.

Matty: I think that’s important when we think about the events. I wrote a blog post last year that I’ll link to where I used to be very involved in swing dancing. The parallels between the swing dancing community and DevOps community are really interesting to me. The parallel that I see in this case is there used to be these things called Lindy Exchanges. I look at them as similar to DevOps Days, where they’re very community, local-type events. They started because a whole bunch of dancers in Chicago went to San Francisco, met some new friends, and invited them to come back to Chicago for a weekend. And they’re like, wow. And then took them out to like all their favorite places to dance. And then what’s happened though, and I think this is the parallel— I’m going somewhere— to what you’re talking about Silicon Valley, is that over time as these things became big, so people would say, oh, well, I want to have a Lindy Exchange in, you know, in my town and everything, and we’ll invite people. Well, your regular venues are built for maybe 100 people coming to dance, right? But now you’re bringing in 500 people, so you start ending up to have— and you have these national swing DJs that travel, and then every Lindy Exchange becomes the same except it happens to be in your particular town. And then I think that’s the trick with DevOpsDays, is that there’s a common feel, and I think that’s something we try not to do, is like you said, you’re doing a balance of national speakers, but your local speakers, you have a context that’s the same, But, it still is the thing that makes it special about itself, and that’s maybe kind of a little bit of a bummer, like you said, with the Silicon Valley one, where it was almost like, even though it wasn’t necessarily because it was localized, but that particular event had its own flavor. As part of evolution, the flavors are changing a little bit. But, I think what you don’t want to do is say, I want to start DevOpsDays Des Moines, and I’m going to go and I’m going to do a carbon copy of everything they did in Minneapolis, right? Because then why did I— it should still have the Des Moines flavor. Yeah.

Bridget: [00:15:28] That’s one of the reasons, actually, as John and I are both on the core team, and one of the reasons that we absolutely insist that an event is organized by people in its local community is that we want it to have the local flavor. So, like, if we talked to some people at one point who wanted to hold a Destination DevOps Days, you know, it was actually, I believe they were thinking of Las Vegas, and I’m like, that’s excellent. You’re going to talk to the people who run whatever meetups there are in Las Vegas? And that one didn’t end up coming together. But point being, like, if you would like something to be a devopsdays.org-sanctioned event, it needs to tie in with the local Yeah, and you know, it’s interesting, Matt, when you were talking—

John: I totally agree, Bridget. I mean, that is the way it is, and it’s what keeps it kind of pure. But you know, you were talking about the national events and all. You know, it was funny, in— I think it was 2000— so in 2012, or so 2013, let me get this right. So we had ’09, ’10, ’11, oh, and then ’12, I kind of backed off some of the organizing of the Mountain View one, right? So we were still kind of quasi in this 2-a-year thing. One in Europe, one in the US. And, um, and we were gonna have it at Google, and, and all of a sudden, like about a month before the due date, Google said, oh, by the way, we’re not doing food. And everybody’s like, oh no, okay. Because we’d had it at LinkedIn the prior 2 years and they’d done everything. And then about 2 weeks before, maybe 3 weeks, I forget the time, they said, oh, by the way, we want everybody to fill out an NDA. And I’m not dissing Google, but we got on a kind of, you know, you know, a red alert con call, like, okay, like, this is not gonna work. 300 or 400 people showing up and having to call their company and ask if it’s okay to sign an NDA. And, you know, you know, imagine the line in the queue, you know, people like me, I would have to call, you know, my employer and say, hey. Anyway, so we made a last-minute call. The Cloud Camp King Dave Nelson had this— I don’t know how many of you guys were at that one where we had the whole— it was that warehouse that we had the whole thing. And And one of the postmortems that we had after that was, are we limiting the amount of people that possibly can come to these events? Because the venues that we— and the problem is, for all you guys that have run events, you get to that point where the venues, it’s like 400, and then it’s like, you gotta go to a hotel. Yep. So the next year we decided to go to a hotel, and it was a disaster. So, I mean, the logistics of— I remember Patrick calling me saying, John, what in the hell is going on here? It sounds like they want, you know, $10,000 just for a stage. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa. We thought stages were included. You know, I got to the joke where I felt like at the last minute they were going to hit us for oxygen charges, you know, and read your bill carefully, John.

Matty: [00:18:18] They probably did. You know what hotels charge for coffee, right?

John: I know it’s crazy.

Bridget: And coffee’s like $60 a gallon.

John: And lesson learned for me at that point was, you know what, you know, This is because it’s volunteer-run and because it’s like, so it was, you know, there wasn’t really any criticism from anybody, but it was like, we had to outsource all that stuff. And if you don’t know what you’re doing and dealing with hotels, like that’s what’s going to happen to you. Uh, you’re going to get hit with, you know, uh, oxygen charges the day before. And so, um, it was kind of almost a, a pullback reaction that, you know what, maybe we shouldn’t, let’s just worry about how many people go here. And in the end, It works out well, right? Because I think you’re right. I think if we had 3,000 people coming to a DevOps Days, open space would be complicated. Yeah, I think we got the right mix. I think, I think this has evolved the way it was supposed to be. I think that’s an important—

Matty: that’s interesting that it’s sort of that mystical feel of DevOps Days capping out at a certain size kind of probably came out of that. You know, like, let’s say you’d actually had a really good experience with dealing with hotels, then it would have kind of been a little bit more like, oh yeah, I can— I should shoot for 1,000 people at DevOps Days Chicago. And but what’s happened is that sort of helped frame that to the point that if you talk to a lot of organizers, I feel like, or at least again the ones I’ve had experience with, we feel passionately that this keeping the size small is actually what makes the event the way that it is. And we’ve had this problem in Chicago both years that we’ve done it. We sell out. I mean, the first year it freaked us out, Because this is a little dirty secret for people who haven’t organized a DevOps Days. When you do it your first time, you don’t know the fact that everybody registered— like 90% of the people register in the last 2 weeks, right? So you go this whole time going, oh my God, no one’s going to come, and then you have 2 to 3 weeks of, oh my God, I have to turn away so many people. We kept saying we want to keep it to a certain size because we like the idea that you can fundamentally, kind of, if you really wanted to, talk to everybody at that event. Event if you’re about 300. You know what I mean? You don’t feel— you feel like everyone’s having a common experience. And some more too about keeping that common experience for all the participants versus some more traditional conferences where, well, Bridget’s really interested in ELK, so she’s gonna go to those things, and Trevor’s gonna go to some .NET sessions, and John’s gonna, you know, just hang out in the hallway track, and, you know, Matt’s gonna go do this. And then maybe over— if there are open spaces or whatever, we We didn’t have a common morning, and I love that about DevOpsDays.

Bridget: [00:20:53] Yeah, I really like single-track conferences in general. I actually probably have a slightly different opinion of hotels just because my partner Joe has actually worked in hotel event technology for almost 20 years. So I know exactly how to read BEOs, and I know exactly where the hotels are going to get you. And we ran the first DevOpsDays Minneapolis at a university, and we quickly outgrew the space. And for the second one, we had about 370 warm bodies, and we did hold it at a hotel, and that was actually a pretty smooth experience. Experience, and we think that we are definitely going to grow it next year. So I think that some of that, that gets into logistics things. Jason Dixon does a great job with Monitorama, which is a single-track conference with 600 people. Of course, it doesn’t have open space, so you do have to put some considerations in there for that. I really do think that juggling logistics is part and parcel of running a conference, but It’s more about what do your local organizers want to focus on? Where do they have some experience? Where do they have some desire to spend some time? Or what are they worried about or not worried about? Like, I don’t want to say that DevOps Days have to cap out at 300. I don’t think they do. And I know Austin is bigger than that, for example. So, it just kind of depends on your local needs. But when people are going to run one for the first time, I definitely encourage them to look at the size of their local meetup, see how many people usually show up. Ballpark, they might have 3 to 4 times as many people as that just organically.

Matty: [00:22:21] Yeah, think about what you can handle. And I think you made a good point, Bridget, right? Which depends on— in your case, you’re like, hey, I have experience in knowing how to do this, so this makes sense for our particular event. And but what we, we, we all know, or Trevor by osmosis of being, you know, working at the office where most of DevOps Days Chicago meetings occur, running a DevOps Days event is substantially different than professional event organization organizing, because you have mostly volunteers as your core organizers and things like that. One thing that I think is important, you said when you’re a new organizer you’re starting something out new. I helped quite a few. I think a lot of us have helped guide different events and things like that. My take on it is, and this is what we did with Chicago, was we looked at the common format and said, well, did we want to do something a little different? Then fortunately, and I wish I could identify who it was on our team that was the smart person in this case, and I know it wasn’t me. I’m going to guess it was probably Michael Lanyon or Jerry Kettle, said, why don’t we just stick with the format the first time, and then we’ll think about changing it? And then, sure enough, the second year, it was exactly bog-standard DevOpsDays. But, like John said, it was Chicago. Chicago feels different than anybody else. Minneapolis, in my mind, follows the standard— I hate to say template. It is different than every other DevOpsDays. And then there’s ones like New York has experimented with different formats. Austin does it different. When you’ve done it for a while and you get a feel for your thing, go ahead and kind of, you know, it’s that Shu Hare thing, right? First it’s obey, then detach, right? So your first few, obey, ’cause you’ve never done one in your city before. You don’t know what your city’s gonna be like. So I think that’s a good formula.

John: [00:24:10] I think there’s a couple of great points between both of you, what you guys both made. One, you know, I think you’re right. You know, people, we all get this, but, you know, I’ve been doing this for quite a while. People say, how do I do a Dallas Days, right? Like, I think you’re absolutely, I think there’s a couple of things. Here. One, you definitely follow the rules the first time. Like, the template for doing it is so baked. Like, if you want to know how to do it the way it’s been done for almost every first one, and, and certainly a lion’s share of the ones that still continue, you know, follow the rules. I think what you did in Chicago was spot-on. Learn your— I mean, everybody’s gonna have their local flavor. You know, Austin took a lot of heat for having dual tracks. Hey, they felt, you know, they’ve done it what, 5 times I think by my count, right? They basically have learned a lot about their community and the feedback and what they’ve done. So, um, and I think you’re spot on, you know, follow the rules the first time, get your feet wet. And, and on the hotel thing, Bridget, I think you also raised an excellent point. So if we sound like hotels are evil, and, and that, that’s, that shouldn’t be the takeaway, but that one of the takeaways should be that If you know nothing about event planning, like be very careful about working with a hotel. In your case, Joe had experience. I mean, because Minneapolis was spotless. In fact, it was funny when I saw it. I saw that you were in the Hilton or something like, ooh, wow. Okay. That’s interesting. And, but it was, it was, you know, it was like, oh my goodness, this ran like a velocity in terms of, and I didn’t know the backstory that Joe had that background. Right. Like, so just like if you’re listening and saying, hey, I live in a certain city, could I do this? Cause I have another point about that. Is unless you have somebody on the committee who has actually worked with a hotel, probably stay away from a hotel. However, if you have somebody who has absolute experience, and to Matt’s point, you’re all volunteers, so be very careful about how much food you put on your plate. You know how you yell at your— you correct your kids, you know, like, hey, do you really wanna order that steak and eggs? And every time my young kid winds up leaving 90% of it on the plate, right? That when you’re sitting about the, you know, the volunteer time and the time that it’s gonna take and all. So I think those are all good points. Another point I want to make is about growth. Again, you know, every local venue will learn how to learn what makes sense for them. Some might want to cap it and keep it a certain way. I think that, you know, what you guys did in Minnesota worked really well, right? You know, it would be interesting to see that next year at like 600, 700, or 750 150 and see how that worked out. The logistics there, you know, one of the things— I know I’m a chatty Cathy, but you knew that before you guys brought me on the show. But, you know, one of the things that is incredibly important, and like it makes the difference of a good versus great and possibly bad, is the proximity of the open space rooms. You know, a lot of people talk about a venue, and I like, you know, I go through kind of the dos and don’ts. But I remember there was one in New York where it was at, you know, a Polytech Institute in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn was fine, the location was fine, but the distance you had to travel to open spaces was— by the time you got there, it was— the discussion was halfway done. And but by the second day, you basically picked the room and stayed in that room.

Bridget: [00:27:42] Yeah, that’s actually one of the reasons we definitely found we outgrew our first venue. And I don’t want to stay on this topic too long just because there’s so many other great things we should talk about, but one, one thing that we did outgrow in our first venue was the fact that there were limited breakout space, you know, rooms, and they were on different floors from the main hall and from each other. And that’s kind of one of those things where like we didn’t really think it would be a problem and we were wrong. It was definitely a problem. There’s a lot of stuff like that that I think it’s great that a lot of organizers have helped write the, you know, guiding documents, which is, you know, very useful because I’ve seen that there’s— we actually have a DevOps Days Istanbul is getting ready to start planning. They sent through an email in Turkish, and I thought, I’m going to click on this thing in Gmail that says translate it, because why not? I’m kind of interested. What are they saying? With the organizer page link, and they’re saying, you have to read this. This is very useful and important, or something along those lines. I was like, yep, this is pretty great. We haven’t heard anything from Trevor for a little while, and I know that Trevor is in the unique position on this Hangout of being the one person who has not run a DevOps Days. So Trevor, do you want to give us a little bit of your perspective as an attendee?

Trevor: [00:28:56] So I’ve really only been to part of 2 DevOps Days Chicagos, and they’re fantastic. I mean, the getting— I mean, so I got to speak this year at DevOps Days Chicago, which was awesome, and everybody was super warm and receptive. You know, I kind of was nervous because everybody knows I do a lot more Microsofty things, so, you know, there’s always that worry. I mean, I’m talking about open open source, but, but it was still nice to kind of— everybody was welcome. And I was like, we’re super worried because I was kind of talking about open source towards the Microsoft people who might not have been doing open source, but even the people who’ve been doing open source for years were all cheering at the end. It was fun and welcoming. And I just love the open spaces as well because, you know, between the law of 2 feet and the variety of topics, there’s, there’s no way you’re gonna get stuck with something that’s not useful.

Bridget: So that’s actually a really interesting point, is you had attended the first DevOps Days Chicago, and then you chose to speak at the second one. I’m guessing that this is not, you know, you don’t necessarily speak at all of the events ever. So like, do you wanna talk a little bit about what the process that led you to consider speaking at a conference like this?

Trevor: [00:30:07] Well, sure. I did submit a talk for the first DevOps Day Chicago. I think I’d mentioned this before. I was sitting in the next room from where they were organizing, and I got to hear just the crackles through the wall of, I think that sounds like my talk, and then the decision not to include it. Oh, so I love to tease Matt about that one.

Matty: I fought for you.

Trevor: I know you did.

Matty: You were in the— it was the top call, so that was good.

John: Well, you know what, that might be a good transition discussion here is, you know, the Microsoft and in general what Microsoft has done industry-wide and how it reflects in DevOps days. Because early DevOps days, you know, I remember a couple— in fact, to be honest with you, I think Jeffrey Snover— you were talking before about Jeffrey Snover. People don’t know Jeffrey Snover’s amazing transformer of Microsoft in so many ways, the inventor of PowerShell, and we could go on and on and on, and we won’t. But in an early Silicon Valley one, he submitted and it got rejected, and it got rejected because it was Microsoft. And me and Damon— me and Damon had already had him on the podcast, and Damon was the one who got him on our DevOps Cafe podcast. He’s like, we got to get this guy on the show. And I was actually being like, I Really? Microsoft? Okay, sure. We got him on a call. Even on the pre-call, I found out our careers were similar. We both worked with Tivoli at the same time. It was like, oh my God, you’re a fascinating person. By the time the CFPs were rolling along, I forget what year this was, me and Damon are yelling and hollering like, we’ve got to vote this one. Why are we not doing it? The general consensus was Microsoft just doesn’t fly at a DevOps Days. Thank goodness. Thank goodness. I think the changes in Microsoft in terms of leadership and what they’re doing and how they’re embracing new technology, and now it is common to see Microsoft presentations at DevOps Days, as it should be.

Matty: [00:32:19] It’s common to see Microsoft sponsoring DevOps Days. There was, and I’m gonna get it potentially wrong, but it was in Boston. I think Boston’s was at Microsoft. There was one that I remember seeing was like at an office. Actual— New York, was that—

John: well, the New Yorks, yeah, the New Yorks, they’ve always been, uh, you know, it’s just, it was the difference between them, um, committing, you know, that those, um, those centers that they have, like the Boston one, the, the— what is it called— the Nerd or whatever. And New York one, they’ve always been, you know, um, that, that’s a group that just basically says if you got an event and you’re not going to blow the place up, certainly come here and use it if the date’s available. Um, and if you are going to blow it up, just pay for it. Yeah, that’s right, if you’re gonna wreck the room or something like that. But, but, but in general, even then, that still wasn’t kind of an overall, like, acceptance until we actually started seeing, like you said, them showing up as sponsorships. Actually, the CFP selection committee saying, oh my goodness, we could actually have Tara Freestone over for a keynote, that would be awesome, you know. So I think that’s been a very healthy part of We’ll put a link to that, the Snover episode of DevOps Cafe, in the show notes as well.

Matty: [00:33:28] That’s one of my favorites, and especially, John, it’s just like you said, because as a listener to that episode, you can tell that you kind of went through— again, you talked in the pre-call, I guess, which I didn’t know about, but even through the episode, you could see your character arc, right? Through certain things where you’re like, oh, wow, OpenWMI, what the hell is that?

John: Yeah, I wish we would have recorded the pre-call because Damon sent me this thing. Hey, I got this guy that wrote this paper at Microsoft. I’m like, yeah, yeah, sure. I love Damon with all my heart, so I trust his— I’ve learned to trust his instinct, right? But so I didn’t— I’m like, hey, Damon, if you’re saying it’s a good deal, let’s do it. You know, like, we don’t question each other. I mean, it’s like probably you guys have that rhythm now, right? You like it. And, and so, but we get on the call and we’re just talking about our backgrounds, and he’s like, yeah, I left DEC and I wrote this thing called Windows for NT. I’m like, You’ve got to be kidding me. That product was the only successful thing that ever worked in Tivoli. We went on for like 40 minutes before the call comparing backgrounds, and like, were you doing Tivoli at this point? So we had this unbelievable pre-call call. Anyway, yes, Snowver is amazing. I’ll point out one thing you might want to— and I haven’t seen it yet, but there have been absolute rave, rave reviews about his presentation at the DevOps Enterprise Summit ’15. And he talks about— so I gotta, I gotta say, if you don’t know Snover, he was working at IBM. Microsoft did an industry hire to pull him away from IBM to Microsoft. He went over to Microsoft. This is a really short version. He basically realized that, you know, from his background, Microsoft was not going to succeed as a systems management tooling company unless it had some form of command line or Linux-like toolchain capabilities. So he started writing writing this white paper and actually literally started writing PowerShell. He was then told, at your position, you cannot do this. He took a demotion and then started working on it. Now, I think he’s told me— he denies it now— that he says now a senior executive walked in his office and said, what the heck, hell, did you not know, understand about Windows? But I’m pretty sure somewhere along the line he told me it was Steve Ballmer, but now he says it wasn’t. But the point is, he is an amazing transformer. And, from what I’ve heard, he does a little bit of his history of how he got there. I’ll say one last thing I think is amazing. I always tell Jeffrey that I can’t imagine— if you look at how hard or what he’s accomplished at Microsoft, imagine had he been anywhere else what he would have accomplished. In a place that he was fighting a battle and battle and battle and battle that nobody was listening to for years. Years and has truly created transformation there. Anyway, so maybe he’s—

Matty: [00:36:29] hey, but I want— something that he said on our show makes me wonder if what you would think would be true would actually not be true. That if he was somewhere where he wasn’t fighting those battles, he may not have accomplished as much as he did. Because he talked when he was on with us about, you know, the challenges he had and how that really, you know, was what creates resolve and creates creates the driving stuff. So almost if he didn’t have to fight— again, so we love Jeffrey on this show too, so, and he occasionally listens. So he’s probably— if this happens to be one, you know, he’s sitting there going, why are you guys gossiping about me?

John: That’s a great point because it’s like, you know, they say, you know, Sherlock Holmes— well, Sherlock Holmes, because of Dr. Moriarty, right? Like, so yeah, yeah, stuff was his Moriarty. Anyway, brilliant, brilliant.

Bridget: Nice. Now this makes me curious to go find if we have had Snowver speak at a DevOps Days. If we haven’t, maybe Maybe that’s something that has to happen in 2016.

Matty: I’ve already put him in Austin.

John: Oh, you have? Not Austin, Amsterdam. He did one of the keynotes in Amsterdam, but having him again is certainly not a bad idea. Nice.

Bridget: [00:37:36] I’m just kind of thinking, looking ahead to 2016, and obviously there’s a bunch of events already planned. Let’s look back at 2015. Which ones did we all go to? Trevor, you said you made it to Chicago. That was the only one you made it to in 2015.

Trevor: I was supposed to go to Paris and I was supposed to go to Minneapolis, but scheduling did not allow for that to be a reality.

Bridget: Aww, we missed you. I mean, yeah, realities for me this year with job stuff and other things were— and switching jobs between Drama Fever and Pivotal and whatnot. I spoke at New York and then I ran Minneapolis, and then I showed up at Silicon Valley for like an hour, you know, at our sponsor booth. So like, that was, that was my 2015 in DevOps Days, even though I did have a lot of help and guidance that I provided to new events that were kicking off. How about you, Matt?

Matty: So, yeah, so I went to DevOps Days Rockies, which was in Denver, and it was their first one, and I spoke there. It was really fun. They did a great event, and I think they’re going to do a great one this year. I was at Minneapolis. I did an Ignite in Minneapolis, and Pete Cheslock screwed it up. And I think that’s why we haven’t been at the same event or same location since then. I think he’s hiding from me. And again, I helped run Chicago for our second year. I kind of was consultative to Ohio. I was gonna go to Ohio, but Ohio and Detroit being one right after the other, I had to pick one or the other, and Detroit solved that problem for me by inviting me to speak. So I gave a presentation and an Ignite at Detroit, and that was it. I was hoping to be able to go to Charlotte. That didn’t work out, work stuff. I’m hoping to go to more. I’m, you know, would love to get to one of the international ones this year, but we’ll see. Work is work, right? So absolutely, we’re trying to figure out who went to the most, and I think when we added up the numbers overall, it was you, right? You like destroyed Michael Ducey, I think, in totals. There was a Twitter argument about this.

John: [00:39:39] Yeah, I had 35, although what’s-his-face Jason is like on my Jason went to every single one in North America this year. I think he might overtake me next year.

Matty: I don’t think Jason wants to go to any DevOpsDays next year.

John: I’m going to have to play Nancy Kerrigan and the other one.

Bridget: If you looked on the 2015 list, John, which ones were you at?

John: I did 10. Actually, this might have been the most in one year, again, as they grow. I did Paris in the beginning of the year, New York. There’s ones that I try never to miss. And thank you, Bridget, for doing such a good job in Minnesota, because now I might have to make that a not miss one too. But Austin and Amsterdam. Austin, my heart is in Austin. I try to go there every year no matter what. That’s the other thing is you get to fall in love with the organizers too, not just the people, but Austin, they’re my family.

Matty: [00:40:45] Ernest Mueller, James Wick, and Karthik and all.

John: I feel like they’re family. On the last night, we all go out to dinner on our own little dinner. And Amsterdam, right? You’ve got all those folk over in Amsterdam, Harm and all the Schubert Phils. And so those are ones that I just— there’s a place in my heart for those. And so I did Amsterdam. The one that was interesting also— I don’t know, Matt, if you were at it. I don’t remember. Bridget, the Washington, DC one, the first governor. Government one.

Bridget: Ah, yes, Nathan Harvey put that together with great folks out there.

John: Yeah, again, there’s another like a guy I just love, right? Like an organizer that just go— like, it’s worth going to DC just to get to hang out with Nathan, right? Like, although you do get to see him in other places, but, but the government one was fascinating because, you know, we— it was at the US Patent Office. There was a fair amount of the speakers. You know, one of the things early on, they asked me if I wanted a keynote, and actually Nathan did, like, hey John, can you do a history of DevOps. Most likely, everybody here is going to be, what the heck is this DevOps thing? I’m like, fine. Word to the wise, core organizers see all emails. So be careful what you say about a core organizer. Nobody said anything negative, but I watched the whole debate of, should this be a local event given it’s government? Do we really want John to come in? Nathan was— again, I don’t think he’s ever heard me say this— he was sort of my champion of, hey, John has a If we can’t get Patrick, let’s get John, because he has an incredible history of this. It worked out well. Long story short is a lot of the presentations were people who were deeply in the government. Mark Escher from Immigration and just the list of all the different— I think we had the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. A lot of the keynotes were people who were in the government— not keynotes, but presentations were government agencies that were fighting the battle with DevOps. That was a great event. I’m trying to think what else. Obviously, Minnesota was brilliant. Actually, Minnesota was like— it was a triple whammy for me. One is I went in a day early, and I got to hang out at the Target DevOps Dojo. I don’t know if you’ve had Heather and Ross on. You probably have.

Bridget: [00:43:16] I have, in fact. A bunch of us Pivotal people got to go up and take the tour and chat with those folks, and it was really great.

Matty: Last year on our Enterprise episode, and then he went and did his own podcast.

John: And yeah, but, um, the— so we had— so I got to spend a day with— at Target in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Minnesota. That always seems strange to me, but I think it’s in Brooklyn Park.

Bridget: Okay, Brooklyn Center. I can never remember which is which. Anyway, far-flung northern suburb.

John: Yeah, and don’t, don’t take an Uber from the airport.

Bridget: Oh yeah, no, that was really far. It’s like taking an Uber to Santa Clara.

John: Yeah. So that was one thing. The event itself was— the lineup was amazing. You had Mary Poppendieck. It was like that alone, I probably would have said, you know what, their agenda is good enough that if I didn’t know anything about anything, I’m going to go there. So it was a great event. Then of course, in my heart, I pinged Bridget and I said, I’ve got a 12-year-old son. What do you think about him submitting for an Ignite talk? I love you, Bridget. I love you, Bridget. Again, you probably would have done it had you not known, me anyway because he had a good, you know, he had a valid talk. I mean, but my 12-year-old gave an Ignite on, you know, on basically using R and data science. So I mean, so that event probably— sorry to everybody else who I love you out there— was my favorite one.

Matty: [00:44:41] But, and by the way, after following up that Ignite, which was actually super interesting, with me getting up there and doing slides about like, you know, Markov bot about Pete Cheslock, I was like, what kind of a jackass am I?

Bridget: I put yours last on purpose because it was very lighthearted and fun. I loved your son’s talk though.

Matty: It was—

John: you know what, my kids couldn’t stop talking about your talk. It was the whole discussion for the rest of the week was the bot thing. Who is this guy? And they were absolutely fascinated about that whole concept of some bot going up and taking whatever he tweeted. That’s all they could talk about. So you actually scored with my kids big time.

Matty: Nice. Results. Nice.

Bridget: So, okay, so we’ve talked about like a wide variety of, you know, events. And John, since you got to go to so many this year, like what kind of patterns or themes did you see emerging like in the topics? Because of that, of course, even though every event is independently organized and every event independently decides on what its talks should be, I’m guessing that there’s kind of, you know, trends that come and go. Like, do you want to talk a little bit about the patterns you’ve been seeing?

John: [00:45:50] Yeah, I mean, one that is very near and dear to me is that really kind of started not at DevOps Days but at SCaLE in the beginning of the year. You know, I, I, you know, I, I wrote a blog article about this, and, and, and it just, you know, the whole thing about me, it just, it still kind of hits me hard. But again, I’ll try to make this short, but I’m sitting at the Marriott and breakfast. Chris West who’s an LA workhorse chef and a very good friend of DevOps and steward of DevOps, a great young man. It’s funny how I get to call older people young, but I get the liberty of doing that. We’re having breakfast, and he says, did you hear about— at the time, it was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because I’m horrible at names. Did you hear about such-and-such passing away? I’m like, no. He goes, I think you know him. I’m like, yeah, you know. Trying to be egotistical, but I know a lot of people. I maybe do. Left it at that. And then we said— I said, well, that’s terrible. A young man committed suicide in our community. Horrible. I’m sitting in the open session. It’s actually the DevOps Day of SCaLE, which is the Los Angeles Linux user conference. And I start realizing, oh my God, because they’re starting to do a tribute to this young man, and they show his Twitter thing, but he’s kind of laying down and you can’t really see his face. And I’m like, oh my God, please don’t be that the young man that I’ve gotten to know over the last 3 years. I was crying now, right? And it was. And before I even was able to Google or look up this website, I realized it was a gentleman named Carlo Flores, and he committed suicide about a week before there. And it That whole thing, I couldn’t get out of my mind for like a week. I called Gene Kim. I said, Gene, I’m going to write this article. I don’t even know where to put it because I don’t even know how to categorize it. He said, no, no. You need to put this article on IT Revolution blog. I did, and it had a major reaction. One of the themes in Open Space— well, I was asked to do a keynote in New York on it, on burnout. I did that. In fact, the gentleman after me, Justin Lentz, actually told— he did an amazing presentation about his anxieties. This young, brilliant— I say, use the word brilliant— young, really tall, good-looking man.

Bridget: [00:48:22] Like, you look at him, pretty smart, and pretty smart.

John: And you look at him and say, well, how could that guy have any problems? And he gets up and talks about his troubles with anxiety. And I spoke to him after. He said, John, it was your blog article gave me the courage to actually get up and give a presentation like this, right? And it was an amazing presentation. And we saw— and then we saw like in Austin and these like 50, 60 people sitting around in open spaces talking about burnout. And in fact, I think it was Austin. This was an amazing point. Um, we were in an open spaces and Josh Corman, who I’m another big fan of, CTO at Sonatype, we’re sitting around a table because he had done a burnout survey in ITsec. Near the end, he asked how many people had seen a therapist. There were like 40, 50 people in this circle. How many people have seen a therapist? About 30% of the circle raised their hand. I made the comment, thinking, has DevOps changed the way we think? I said, I wonder how many people 4 or 5 years ago would have really raised their hand. He looked at me and said, John, how many people 40 minutes ago would have raised their hand. In other words, we had gotten so intimate. And I said, you’re absolutely right. Like, like, and, and, and so there’s been 4 or 5 Open Spaces on burnout. I’ve done 2 keynotes, and I decided I wasn’t going to do any more. I did one in Amsterdam, and I didn’t want to capitalize on this, like, tragedy. So I said, this is the last one. Um, but I was in Velocity Amsterdam, and, um, and it was the— now the third— 3 Velocities in a row have run a burnout session. There was well over 100 people in that room, you know. And at the end, John Osborne points at me, and, you know, again, I’m not trying to pat my ego, he gives me the kind of, you know, the eye, the 2-finger eye, 2-finger eye, and he says, this is all because of you, buddy. And but so neither here nor there, the point is burnout and us trying to get a community of people, you know, the thing in our community is we’re very, very passionate about what we do. We get involved in things that can affect a lot of people. You know, me and Damon joke about, imagine you’re working at Uber, right? And that the, you know, whether you hate Uber or love Uber, but imagine the role is to eliminate all cabs from the planet, right? And you’re the one who runs operations for that, the person who runs operations. Like that, like the pressure that we put on young people in the thing. And I think us all being able to sit around in circles talk about, oh, by the way, I have that problem. Oh yeah, me too, me too. And I don’t know, it’s— I think it’s unfortunate it started with a tragedy, but the, the upside is we’re having healthy discussions about things that were possibly hidden in a closet. So that’s a— that to me, that, that’s a, you know, to me one of the most important— beats out any technology discussion of what has happened to share.

Bridget: [00:51:25] Yeah, that’s a really profound and moving point, John, because we as technologists, and especially as people who are working in, like you said, highly visible if something goes wrong work, and yet we ourselves are kind of hidden, there is a lot of pressure. And it’s kind of that, you know, sysadmin as IT janitor, no one notices unless the janitor doesn’t do their work. Like, I like the idea of us making sure that we’re creating humane spaces for people who are dealing with, you know, say, web stuff at scale or whatever, so that we don’t forget the essential humanity of the people trying to do this work. Because it’s like, it’s, it’s so important. And you’re right, if we’re seeing these kind of discussions in our technical communities, finally, like, long overdue, but I really appreciate you and Gene and everyone bringing these discussions to the forefront.

John: I think 2 other important themes. One we can go through real quickly because we’re starting to wind down is complexity has showed up, and, and that’s good. We’re seeing things like Cynefin, cybernetics, or Jeff Sussner’s book Designing Delivery, who’s been brilliant if you haven’t read it. You know, Cynefin, OODA loops, right? We’re seeing this all tie about feedback loops and thinking about complexity, and then that’s a great subject. And so we can dig up some show notes of good, good presentations on that. But I think the one I want to talk about the most is— and really, you know, I go back to this, I’m gonna make you cry, Bridget— is that you, in a lot of ways, you changed my life because the way I thought— there we go. No, you know, the way I thought about being a male and a person, I was just kind of had blinders on about like, you know, why do they always whining about this? Why are they always whining about that? You know, like, really, really, is it, you know, is this a first world problem or not? And you basically Basically, it was something that you wrote after your first DevOpsDays Silicon Valley about some little simple thing, and the light bulb went on. You said something like, at the end of the— you had had such a wonderful time. It was your first full presentation, I think, in DevOpsDays Silicon Valley. You were shining, like, bubbly about how excited you were about the whole event. Then I knew that because I think, if you remember, we were trying to have a more diverse subject. I reached out to you and I said, I really would like you to submit here because you’re awesome. I saw you in New York. You’re amazing. You did submit and you presented. Then somebody— something I would have done easily— said, hey, let’s us ops guys go out to dinner. You wrote a really good way of explaining, not like, hey, don’t use that word guys. You said, I felt like shit. And I’m like, oh my God, if I was to make Bridget feel like shit, I would really, really feel like shit. And so what that did for me is it opened up a lot of just kind of seeing things I hadn’t seen before. And so in some ways, so diversity across all accounts has been a good theme in our DevOps community. We have, you know, code of conduct started last year. It is, you know, it is now, you know, is part of the manifest.

Bridget: [00:54:55] Yeah, we won’t merge your PR without a code of conduct.

John: Yeah, yeah. So, and, you know, and I think so in a lot of ways, you know, it was obvious that you needed to be a core organizer. And like, I think everybody thinks that that’s an amazing event. We added Jennifer recently. We’re going to add more women to the— but here’s the thing. The DevOps community is better than others. Like I said, I don’t even want to get into this gaming community nonsense. We’re doing better than most, but we still suck. Maybe the same thing about burnout, too. We’re getting better, but we need to crack this thing. I’ll just tell you this one story. I was in London, and this woman who had worked on UK.gov, and I don’t remember her name, but she’s— Anna Shipman.

Bridget: Okay, good, good. She’s a technical architect for the Government Delivery Services.

John: No, it wasn’t Anna, though. It was somebody else. I know Anna. Yeah, no, it was somebody who worked on a team. She worked with Gareth, and then she was actually doing consulting for Docker when I met her. But she obviously had all the goods of technical everything. We were talking about Twitter, and she said, you know, John, I said, I don’t expose my Twitter. You know, when you keep your Twitter handle— I don’t. I’m like, really? Whatever. Why would anybody do that? She went into, like, John, let me tell you something. Y’all are always talking about how we need to get more women into STEM, how we need to get more women in technology, but nobody talks about how do we keep women in technology. She said, I had to turn it off because I give a presentation. We saw this thing with Jessie over this year. She is just a bubbly, amazing Amazing, incredibly— light flows out of her hair—

Bridget: [00:56:43] person to be around. She’s also an amazing technologist and a core maintainer on Docker.

John: I’m kidding. I’m not like one-hundredth of her technical capability.

Bridget: Well, I’m just saying, if people don’t know who Jessie Frisella is, she is a core maintainer of the Docker project.

John: Yeah. Then, again, I don’t even have the link, but she became very prominent this year. People got to see how great she is. She was. And all of a sudden, she started getting this ridiculousness of stuff from— It was trolls. Trolls, but sending pornographic pictures to her. That doesn’t happen to men. Not so much. It’s nonsense. I mean, and I think our DevOps community is better than most, but we’ve still got a long way to go. Diversity has been a big part of this story here.

Matty: I think Minneapolis was— Sorry, Bridget.

Bridget: That was awful. I was going to say—

Matty: I’m going to speak right over Bridget.

Bridget: So I was gonna say the exact— I think we’re gonna say the exact same thing about both Cowie and about John, what they both said at Minneapolis.

Matty: [00:57:44] I thought it was funny because John got up there and was gonna give his— you were introducing something, and this is bad. Well, maybe it’s good that all I remember is what you said, not why. I think maybe you were giving the— oh, you were giving the Docker—

Bridget: it was the open space intro.

Matty: Open space intro, right? So you’re very memorable to me, John, right? But he basically got up there and said, hey, you know, very succinctly, you know, said, you know, someone in our community is getting this thing. He goes, knock it the fuck off, and then sat down. And then, you know, either— I think it was— I think Cowie was the next day, and then John gets up there and gives it— John Cowie gives this great— and we’ll put a link to the salient part in the show notes, you know, this whole thing about using Chef and Etsy and blah blah blah. And then he— and basically the last 10 minutes he goes, okay, so now I’m gonna go on a rant. And I loved— he said, you know, I hear there’s this thing called Minnesota nice, so none of you are gonna leave. And he then for 10 minutes proceeded to say, knock it the fuck off, but here’s exactly why, right? And it was, to me, this is what I thought was interesting, is— and I’m gonna agree with the esteemed, you know, Mr. Willis here— that my experience through doing the show and having Bridget on the show and getting to know Bridget better and everything has helped, and other things I do has helped me be aware of these things. But I think that— and it’s the one thing that John said that was so right— was he said the only part of our industry that needs more straight white males is fixing the straight white males in our industry, you know. And that was kind of like a little bit of a siren song to me kind of thing. So I— it’s— that was an amazing event. It took a lot of, you know— I mean, I’m glad that that really happened, but I agree with John. We’re better than anybody else and we’re awful. So it’s damning with faint praise for us the way that we kind of look at ourselves. We’ve got a lot of work to do.

Bridget: [00:59:35] But we are doing the work and we’re doing the work around burnout. We’re doing the work around diversity and we’re doing the work around interoperating between IT departments in order to create a better working environment for everyone. And like, there isn’t going to be a done because this is a journey. We’re never going to be able to say that we have completely DevOps’d all the DevOps and now we’re done. And it’s perfect. I think that’s like, I guess that’s maybe that’s a good place to end it is just to say you’re all right. We are on a journey of improving and it’s really nice that our community is looking at ourselves and looking at where we can improve. So final words from you on this, John, before we start wrapping up?

John: No, I think it’s, you know, I mean, what was one of the first things that John Ospahr said about the definition of DevOps? It’s about, it’s something about collaboration, right? And so collaboration, you know, Jeff Sussner had, you know, DevOps is empathy, right? You know, it’s like one of those ones like, darn, I wish I would have thought of that, right? But, you know, I mean, it’s about being able to be bold, brave, and communicate, to be able to discuss things and feel free about discussing things. And we talk about burnout, we talk about diversity, we, you know, those kind of things. It also is being able to kind of stand in a room where you know that most of the room has way more experience than you, and feel free that you can suggest that, hey, I don’t think Docker works this way when it’s XYZ, and not feel like, shut up, you only have 1 year of experience. DevOps is great, and it’s about collaboration. It’s about empathy. It’s about receiving. Respect, right? Our whole code of conduct is a respect thing. I’ll give one. This was last year, but this one I think was good. You see the code of conduct, and there are some events that still say, we’re not going to do a code of conduct, which, again, I think that’s silly.

Bridget: [01:01:36] I don’t get it. We should clarify, not DevOpsDays events. They don’t get to be on devopsdays.org without one.

John: There are other events. That’s right. But, if you remember in 2014, In the Ghent reunion, there was this guy that made a really bad remark during his Ignite. He just said it, and he was kind of an old-school person. Immediately, about 5 people went up to Patrick. The whole point of code of conduct is that if you don’t feel comfortable, go to an organizer, and that organizer should address your ability that you’re uncomfortable. In short, that’s basically what we say. And this person made a lot of people feel uncomfortable, and a fair amount of people, including myself, went up to Patrick, you know, and said, hey, you know, that was really not cool. And I think Patrick— someone went and talked. He was actually with a vendor, and I remember seeing him when they went up to address it. He was like, he’s like, oh my god, I can’t believe— oh my god, I’m such an idiot. I’m I’m an idiot. So he begged Patrick to let him make an apology. He’s like, can I have like 3 minutes on the stage to apologize? And like, yeah. And he got up there and he said, you know what? I am an absolute idiot and I absolutely apologize to everybody I offended. And I thought, my goodness, that, you know, like if you’re an organization and not DevOps Days and you don’t think code of conduct works, you know, then you listen to that story because that’s exactly the way it should have worked. He wasn’t an evil person. We shouldn’t have taken him out in the back and flogged him. He made a really bad mistake. He wasn’t being empathetic to his audience, but it self-corrected beautifully.

Bridget: [01:03:24] I think that that’s wonderful, and that’s the spirit of DevOps Days right there, because you go with blamelessness. You go with, hey, you’re not a terrible person, but you did something that isn’t right for the organization, for the community. Let’s self-correct. Having that support in place so that he felt that he could self-correct. Correct is super important. I think it’s— these are, these are good events is basically the TL;DR there.

John: One last thing in case you’re listening to this, and I suspect if you’re a common listener of this podcast, you don’t— this doesn’t need to be said. There’s a lot of fun technology discussions. I mean, like, there’s some really cool stuff to learn, um, you know, possibly something about Docker, Docker, Docker. There’s a little bit of Docker at some of them. There’s certainly a lot of— there’s a lot of Docker and other ones. I mean, literally, I mean, if you’re somebody that’s sitting around, especially in enterprise, and, like, just getting hammered by all these buzzwords and technologies, and, oh my God, should I start with Chef? Should I start with this? Should I Puppet? Should I do that? I don’t know what to do.

Bridget: [01:04:27] Oh, your VP says you should have microservices. That’s right. Yeah, that’s right.

John: Come to DevOpsDays, and you’ll get to hear practitioners tell you real stories about, you know, what works, what doesn’t work, their opinions. Some opinions differ. So it’s not just, you know, Again, you should know we’ve got a great mix of empathy, compassion, really deep subjects, but a heck of a lot of good technology fun too.

Matty: I want to give one more shout-out that just reminded me when you talked about, you know, you want to learn about a thing you don’t know. So there we had a woman named Cora Hayes-Megan attended DevOps Days Chicago. It was her first DevOps Days, and in fact, actually, she’s just getting started in technology to begin with. It was her basically day zero of her dev boot camp was when DevOps Days started. She wrote a blog post we’ll link to in the show notes about what that experience was like, about going and listening and learning about the goats and the unicorns and all this other stuff, but how it was helpful to be able to absorb those things. And I thought it was an especially interesting post because a lot of times we feel like going to conferences— and we talked about this a little bit on our conferences up, that, you know, when are you gonna have a chance to really be able to talk to people who will be— who would love— not only will they be willing to talk to you, you won’t be able to get them to shut up at a certain point, you know, about how passionate they are. So anyway, she just sent me an email the other day about now she’s finished her boot camp and now she’s going and getting started doing work. So we’ll put a link to the blog post. I thought it was really interesting, but that made me— yeah, so no matter what level, you don’t have to be John Willis to go to DevOps Days and have an awesome some time. And you don’t have to be a brand newbie either. You can be any of the people.

Bridget: [01:06:10] And I should mention, you don’t need to be John Willis or Bridget Kromhout or Matt Stratton or even Trevor, because I know we’re going to get you helping with this too, Trevor. You don’t need to be those people to run a DevOps Days. So I guess that’s the takeaway that I want to leave you all with, is wherever you’re listening to this, if you would like to run a DevOps Days in your town, um, we can help you make that happen. So reach out, uh, info@devopsdays.com. Days.org, or just, you know, come at us on Twitter or whatever.

Matty: The, the other thing I wanted to point out is you don’t have to be any of the people we’ve aforementioned to speak at a DevOps Days. We usually talk about upcoming CFPs. There is going to be an upcoming feature on our website in the next few weeks where they will all be listed as we know about them, and there will be a link if you are an organizer of any kind of event Keep your eye out on our website. There’s going to be a link where you can submit so that your CFPs will be included. So the whole point is come to our website and look at it a lot because I worked on it really hard. That’s all. Okay, so hey, by the way, we have a newsletter and you can sign up for it at arrestedevops.com/bananastand. It is the best way to know about upcoming podcast episodes and a good way to find out about cool news with DevOps. And we have an iPhone app if you want to use that, and you can download it for free at arresteddevops.com/iphone.

Trevor: [01:07:32] Thanks again to our sponsors. Be sure to visit them at arresteddevops.com/10thmagnitude and arresteddevops.com/datadog. Thanks so much, John, for joining us tonight, or today, or whenever this is.

John: This was a lot of fun, y’all. It really was. I think it’s just, you know, great respect for both— all 3 of you, but certainly Definitely, I kind of figured this would be fun, and it basically lived up to expectations.

Matty: You’ll be on again. We’ll corner you.

Trevor: Absolutely. Loyal listeners, if you enjoy listening to Arrested DevOps, we’d appreciate it if you would visit arresteddevops.com/itunes and leave us a review in the iTunes Store.

Matty: You should also— oh, go ahead. While you’re in the iTunes Store, go leave a good review and rating for DevOps Cafe too.

Trevor: Yeah, we would love to know what you thought of this episode. Please leave us comments at arresteddevops.com/devopsdays2015.

Bridget: [01:08:43] Be sure to check us out at arresteddevops.com or @ArrestedDevOps on Twitter. We’re always happy to get your input, ideas, or feedback at shows@arresteddevops.com. Please let us know any ideas you have for future episodes.

Matty: I’m Bridget at Bridget Kromhout. I’m Matt at Matt Stratton.

Trevor: And I’m Trevor at Trevor G Hess.

Matty: We’re Arrested DevOps. And remember, there’s always DevOps in the banana stand.