devopsdays Minneapolis 2018

Jam: [00:00:06] Cat.

Bridget: I can’t do this with the cat.

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, Matty Stratton, and with me also is Bridget Kromhout. So, we are here at the 5th annual DevOps Days Minneapolis, one of my favorite DevOps Days, probably the best-run DevOps Days, and I say that as an organizer of DevOps Days Chicago.

Bridget: Chicago is great.

Matty: Chicago is great. But before we get started, we’ll have a word from our sponsors. Chef is a community of professionals practicing DevOps every day. We are making, proving, learning, and shaping the future. We are known for welcoming, encouraging, and liberating others to do the same. We do not talk about change, we do change. Join the community and learn about our solutions at chef.io.

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[00:02:45] Okay, so again, we are here at DevOpsDays Minneapolis 2018, the 5th iteration of this amazing event, and we’ve got a great panel of DevOps Days organizers, speakers, attendees, all sorts of participants, one might even say. So, panel, introduce yourselves, please. Tell us what we’ve won.

Jam: Hi, my name is Jam, or Jamisha Fisher, and you’ve won a duck. And I am also a former DevOps Days Silicon Valley organizer, and I just moved here.

Matty: Interesting.

Bridget: So, what I’m hearing is that you perhaps have a new DevOps Days that you want to get involved with. We’re going to have to talk about that.

Jam: Later, Bridget.

Debbie: Later. All right. I am Debbie Gillespie, and I am one of the organizers of this year’s Minneapolis DevOps Days. It’s my first year doing it, so it’s been fun.

Christian: Fun.

Matty: Hey there.

Christian: I’m Christian Herro, and I am an organizer for DevOps Days Madison, among other things.

Bridget: [00:03:50] Ooh, that sounds like foreshadowing. We’re going to have to get into that. Okay, so, I pulled this fine panel of people together who definitely knew they were gonna be on a panel more than 10 minutes ago, in maybe Jamisha’s case, but not anyone else’s, because it occurred to me as I was trying to figure out, we often try to do a live show here, it’s sort of tradition. I was trying to figure out what goal do we have for this show? This particular recording here at DevOpsDays Minneapolis, what goal do we have? And I thought, Every DevOps Days that I go to, they are always busy and running around with their hair on fire and a little bit understaffed. And it would be kind of great if both more people helped each DevOps Days that existed, and also maybe people wanted to start a DevOps Days in a different city. And so, I thought maybe we would do a little bit of, like, behind the scenes and talking about what goes into creating an event, and what it’s like to either curate it from scratch yourself or perhaps get tapped to step up and do some of the organizing for an existing event. And like just a little bit of what goes into that. So I would love to, since Jam has been doing this for a bit for Silicon Valley, I would love to just start by putting the question to you. Like when you decided to help organize an event, What did you think it was gonna be like, and then what actually happened?

Christian: [00:05:16] Oh, that’s—

Jam: so basically, I got— the story between me and Silicon Valley is I got pulled into Silicon Valley by another organizer, Jennifer Davis. And basically, I think I got pulled in knowing that I got the— pretty much the ask was very, very easy, but I knew from my family running events in the past because my family is the type of people who run events, that it was going to take a lot and that it was going to be different and an adjustment for me. So when I got to it, while it was stressful, it was super fun to be involved and be behind the scenes, especially as a former theater kid. So like, it was enjoyable for me in that experience so much that I took the reins on more the following year that we did it. And it was just fun, like, and of course, like, the one thing I would probably say is the key to a good event is having a good team of people, because you can do it by yourself, but it’s probably not the best of ideas.

Bridget: [00:06:28] Don’t go alone, you know?

Jam: Yeah, it’s like, use the buddy system, people.

Bridget: Nice. So I’m curious, I would love to hear from, you know, like Stratton and Christian, because you’ve also both been involved in various cities for some time. And I think, Stratton, you’ve been doing it about as long as I have. So, how did they suck you in?

Matty: So, yeah, so DevOps Days Chicago is a couple months younger than Minneapolis. And I sort of volunteered. I thought, I’m like, why don’t we have a DevOps Days in Chicago? And this was back in the olden days of 2014. And when we did not have 65 events in a year across however many continents. And I reached out to the core organizers, and they said, well, here’s some people who expressed interest last year, and it didn’t happen. But also, we’re a little concerned because there’s going to be an event in Minneapolis, and you guys might draw from each other, and there might be too much overlap. And now we all laugh at that because you could have DevOps Days like 3 neighborhoods at the same time, and we’re kind of okay with it. But yeah, we kind of put out a A little bit of an email to people who had expressed an interest. We just had an open meeting, said, if you want to do this, come here. We had no idea what we were doing. Most of us had never been to a DevOpsDays. For a lot of us, the first one we went to was DevOpsDays Minneapolis in 2014. We all trucked on up here to—

Bridget: [00:07:51] And then you went home to Chicago and was like, okay, it’s 5 minutes later, we’re going to do that.

Christian: Right.

Matty: And hey, Bridget, good for you.

Bridget: At the top of the Sears Tower, because why not?

Matty: Yeah.

Bridget: Who needs LTE reception? We didn’t.

Matty: We had a great view. But yeah, and we just kind of started. We’ve had, you know, there’s changes to the organizers year over year, but I think there’s about 4 of us who have been there since the beginning. And I think that’s a key part of this, by the way, is that you do need to bring new people in because it brings different voices, brings different perspectives, brings new energy because it gets tiring.

Bridget: Well, and I think that— and I want to get to Madison in a second, but I want to have Jam pitch in on that idea of Bringing new people in, DevOps Days Silicon Valley was one of the earliest DevOps Days. After Ghent started in 2009, I think Silicon Valley ran in 2010. So, it’s been around for quite a while, but what was it like, as opposed to what Stratton’s saying of spinning one up from scratch, what was it like joining one that had been going?

Jam: [00:08:53] It was definitely probably a whole, I would imagine it’s a whole lot less smoother because you already have things in place and vendors in place that you’ve used before. Which kind of cuts it down easily unless you have, you know, a bad experience with a vendor. But otherwise, it’s usually kind of already running, so you kind of just get adjusted to how things are supposed to work. And if there’s new things, like I think the year I joined, I think we were looking for a different video team. Like, you get into that process and be like, here’s how the negotiations for that go, and here’s how you look up pricing, and here’s what you want to keep in mind, and Like, you know, making sure that the videos have captions and what they actually do on, you know, publishing and different types of stuff. So I feel like you, especially as, you know, a new person, especially if you’re super new to organizing, like it gives you more wheels, like training wheels, than if you kind of did it from scratch.

Bridget: [00:09:57] Yeah, so, and then we have Christian.

Christian: So speaking of doing it from scratch, I believe it was the olden days of 2015, A friend of mine suggested that I come up to DevOps Days Minneapolis. Her name was Bridget. And up here she introduced me to my co-organizer Josh, who is pretty awesome. And she said, you guys should do a DevOps Days. And we’re like, I don’t know how quickly we’re going to be able to spin this up because it is currently July. And we didn’t know— there was no pre-existing group in Madison. So what we did was we spun up a meetup, you know, gauged the interest from that, and then started working our butts off to get something off the ground for the next year.

Bridget: And so that, that’s kind of like different models, right? But whether or not like it’s you just kind of decide you want to do one or someone maybe talks you into it, that might be something that happens. Or maybe, like, you come into a pretty established one, or maybe, like, you know, a former coworker just kind of convinces you to come help. Debbie, can you tell us about your experience?

Debbie: [00:11:11] Yeah. My experience was fantastic. It’s been really exciting to be a part of just— So, I’ve attended the last 2 years of DevOps MSP, and it was fun to actually get to see the behind the scenes, what goes into this. How much work goes into this, but also just seeing how well organized it is and how there’s a lot of things already in place with a lot— I mean, we didn’t meet much. We did most things virtually over Slack. And that was really nice because it wasn’t a huge time commitment as far as getting together and making this happen. And a lot of things were already in place. So that was one of the things that was nice coming into an already well-established event.

Bridget: You didn’t have to have burndown charts.

Debbie: Correct. There were no burndown charts.

Bridget: Maybe we already have enough of those in our real lives, you know?

Matty: One thing, I was talking to somebody yesterday, and for all I know, it was Christian, because we have similar conversations with a bunch of people. Someone said, oh, are you— does this— by the way, so for listeners who haven’t caught up, I moved to San Francisco. And the question was, are you going to keep running DevOps Days Chicago? And I was like, I don’t know. Why not? And I realized, like, I haven’t been to an in-person meeting of DevOps Days Chicago this entire year, and we’ve had very few. And I think that’s one of the differences too between when an event is starting and once you’ve been going is we— it was very important for us in that first year we had twice a month, we were like, we met in person. And over the— every year it got easier to be able to do things more virtually because people kind of knew their stuff and could chug away, and you’d have the new folks you’d kind of mentor in, but a lot of that was a little more smoothly running. But I think it’s hard to do it 100% virtually with a brand new team in a brand new city who hasn’t ever done it before. FaceTime’s important.

Jam: [00:13:01] FaceTime is definitely, I feel like, important, but I think it’s also important where you have that connection with other DevOps Days. Like, I feel like the good thing that I love about DevOps Days is that the The core team is pretty well connected. And also, like, once you join a DevOps Days, it’s like a crew. Like, there was somebody visiting me this week who stopped in Minneapolis who is actually a DevOps Days organizer in Portland. And of course, because we’ve both run conferences, it’s like, hey, do you have any suggestions on stuff? But it’s kind of cool to kind of have that camaraderie and also have that community with, you know, beyond just the single city conference that you’re running?

Bridget: Well, we try, but I think that there’s things that aren’t— I just, I heard what you were saying about, oh, it’s good to have support, and then it’s good if we all already know what we’re doing and it runs like a smoothly running machine. But I am going to kind of say it doesn’t always run like a smoothly running machine. Like, I was the worst single point of failure this year. Because I took a new job, which I love, at Microsoft, and it has more travel than my last year at Pivotal did. And it means that I would be too many tasks deep in the queue to think about the fact that maybe we hadn’t ordered something that we should. And then there’s some scrambling to order a replacement. So I think even whether it’s conference organizing or in your job, places where you think everything’s fine, it’s still a good idea to check in with each other to see if it is fine. ’Cause maybe we are just buried and don’t have enough self-awareness to realize that, yeah, we probably need to get rush shipment on that now ’cause we kind of missed the boat on ordering early.

Matty: [00:14:50] I just wanna confirm that we have regular meetings. They’re just not in person. We try to meet in person once a month.

Bridget: Right, and I’m saying that like we kind of got complacent and figured we had it figured out and didn’t really have regular meetings. And I was too much of a seniority point of failure.

Matty: In Chicago, we called that 2015, I think.

Jam: Yeah, that’s definitely like— I feel like that’s definitely sometimes the case. But then it’s again, that’s where you still keeping the communication is key and emails between those meetings as well. But, you know, that can get kind of stressful too. Like, there was definitely some points with me planning being like, oh man, what if I send this email wrong?

Christian: Certainly one of the things that we learned early on was we didn’t get— we just had the core team the first year. We didn’t have any volunteers until about 2 days ahead of time. Josh is signaling 3 days ahead of time.

Matty: [00:15:50] Oh, well, that’s much more reasonable.

Christian: We learned from that that having volunteers is super handy. Like, it helped us offload so much that, you know, we just couldn’t have enough bodies in one place.

Debbie: Yeah, it was, uh, helpful to be part of— we have our volunteers helping out with, uh, just these day-of stuff. Uh, it was also helpful that— so I helped with the sponsor coordination, and there were times I couldn’t keep up with everything just because it— I have a day job and things are coming in. Sponsors are working their day job when they’re contacting us, but it’s not my day job to help with coordinating the sponsors for this, this event. So that was a challenge for me, and it was helpful to have more than one person trying to monitor that because there’d be times I would also be traveling. It’s like, I can’t get to this right now. Uh, that’s definitely a challenge.

Bridget: Oh, and then, uh, I also think that we did a— we, the collective we, which is to say you and Sammy, did a good job of, um, having day-of volunteers for the sponsor stuff. Do you want to talk a little bit about how that worked?

Debbie: [00:16:59] Uh, yeah, so Sammy organized most of that, but it’s been fantastic having them. We set up a runbook, uh, before the event and basically said, you know, and it left it open and said volunteer for stuff. And so people would pick things that they were going to work of, um, work on the day of, and then we’ve just been following that runbook so we know who’s doing what and what needs to happen.

Christian: That is an incredibly good idea.

Debbie: And the kind of stuff is— oh yeah, some of it is just simple things like having someone stationed in the sponsor room so if sponsors have questions they know who to talk to, and explicitly stating that you should be going around to the different sponsors introducing yourself so they know who it is they should be asking questions of.

Matty: We learned that with sponsors, one of the things that we did— this isn’t with a volunteer, but we have an amazing sponsor coordinator in Chicago. We think she’s amazing because She gets that sponsorship. You know, like we were always kind of like, oh, are you interested in sponsoring? No. Okay, whatever. And Margaret’s like, I’m gonna keep bugging you till you actually say no. But we also realized that it was really important to have for day of, and this is what we’re doing this year, is Margaret, who’s the person that these sponsors have been working with the entire time, she’s the only one who talks to sponsors. I mean, it doesn’t mean that they can’t, but what we had last year is you’d have Maddie going around saying, oh, by the way, the raffle’s gonna be blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And then like 5 minutes later, they got Jerry coming around telling the same thing again because he didn’t know that I already went and did that. Nobody tells them this other thing. They don’t know who we are. So, having that, the other thing that I’m really amazed at from the volunteer perspective is volunteering for DevOps Days Chicago is really easy. You volunteer for an hour, you get into the conference for free. Now, what we found is, so, out of the number of people who volunteer, maybe 25 to 40% actually don’t show up. But the people who do, they, like, work the whole event. We can’t get rid of them, you know, which is great. But it’s like, you’re like, hey, you’re done. They’re like, no, no, no, we’ll keep helping.

Bridget: [00:18:49] We’ll keep helping.

Matty: And it’s, it’s As an organizer who you’re having to think about larger scope stuff, it’s being able to have someone to offload and it also having them, we had great volunteers who would come and take things away. And a little spoiler for the incident command workshop later, during fire, in fire departments, an incident commander wears a white helmet and they have a saying that says, if you see someone in a white helmet holding a wrench, take the wrench from them and hit them in the head with it. And that’s what our volunteers are good at. They’re good at saying, hey, you shouldn’t be doing that. Let me show the speaker to the speaker room or whatever. You can, Bridget, you can work on, you know, corralling bigger picture stuff.

Bridget: And I think, spoiler alert, I think Debbie is going to take on the head sponsor role this next year because we need Samantha to run volunteers for us because we had too much ad hoc getting a few people to help here and there. And I have not wanted to run volunteers, but we need someone with, say, Samantha’s eye to detail to do it. So I’m super excited that Debbie is going to take care of our sponsors so that we can have better volunteer stuff. Because that’s something we have not done a great job of.

Christian: [00:20:05] I just wanted to talk about how— I mean, we’ve talked about it a little bit now, but having volunteers is so key. And we found that we get volunteers in and they, you know, they help out and then the ones that are super dedicated, you know, become organizers and they— Yeah, like that’s the way to do it.

Jam: I was just about to add that. I was just like, we’ve like— I was— So side disclosure, I was not a part of Silicon Valley this year, but we had people from previous ones who volunteered who just stepped up and took on more stuff than they needed to. And we were just like, hey, you want to organize? And they were like, sure, absolutely. So it’s just like, it’s keeping in mind that also those volunteers might be a good source of, you know, future organizers.

Bridget: I wanted to talk a little bit too about the actual logistics of getting this sort of thing together. And I know Christian has a Funny slash sad slash lolsad, you know, lolsob story about just like even venue wrangling.

Christian: [00:21:16] I mean, it wasn’t that bad.

Jam: Yeah.

Christian: So, you know, Madison is a much smaller town than either Minneapolis or certainly than Chicago, and we don’t really have too many venues that do this. We have you know, just a few hotels downtown. We have had a great experience at the place we’ve been, but it is, uh, it’s a theater or like the, the civic center of Madison, and they rightly, uh, have to schedule all their opera, theater, everything, and then, then it goes to local arts groups You know, as it should. And then after that, everybody can come in. And they have told us they really like working with us and they try to prioritize us, but we still, because of their mission, have to come in after them, after everyone else. So it has been a struggle getting dates lined up, and Madison is actually not doing 2018 this year. We’re pushing to spring of 2019 in order to get better dates and also not have people necessarily need to experience November in Wisconsin and maybe try out April or May, see if they like that.

Matty: [00:22:41] I would like to get— because before we run out of time, one of the things too, so we’ve talked a lot about behind the music, a lot of logistics. One of the things that’s key about an event like DevOpsDays is the content, right? And I think a lot of folks may be interested to know just what goes into picking a program. And it’s also a little helpful for folks who are looking to submit to understand, spoiler alert, it’s usually not about you that you don’t get picked.

Bridget: It’s more about what the audience needs. Like, you know, I greenlit so many talks about Istio for KubeCon when I was reviewing talks for that. I did not put any Istio talks on stage here. Because it’s not super relevant to exactly what this local audience is doing.

Matty: To put in a little bit of number context, so there’s a little bit of a— this year for Chicago, I decided to go full Bridget, which meant I was in charge of the content. As I told my fellow organizers, I said, you have a voice but no vote. The reason, and that sounds really mean and arrogant, but what we found is that when you choose these things by committee too much, You kind of end up bike shedding over a lot. It takes a very long time. The first year we did DevOps Days Chicago, we met for 3 hours and we thought we were going to get through all of our selection. We got through picking about 4 of the 8 talks, forget about the Ignites, and this was in person and this was crazy. So, it’s kind of an interesting mix of invited talks, what you submitted from the community, you know, from the CFPs. And I’m really proud of our program this year in Chicago. I’ve been proud of it every year, I should be clear. I’m not like, oh, better than the crap we used to put on.

Bridget: [00:24:30] But hey, didn’t I speak in Chicago once?

Matty: You did. That was the first year when we really didn’t know what we were doing, which Bridget can attest to from an AV perspective.

Bridget: I thought it was great except for the lack of LTE. I did not— literally, I did not know you could be in a building, not an airport or an airplane, but a building that was out of LTE range.

Matty: So, yeah, so from a perspective of from the events that you’ve done, Jam, and from Kristen, you’ve done Madison, what are some of the things when you think about choosing content, what’s some of that story like?

Jam: Some of that story is, I think the thing is trying not to try to do differently every year. That’s one big thing. I think one when choosing and reviewing content is try to make sure Hey, we talked about this this year, unless it’s really relevant or they have a different spin on it, like, we probably shouldn’t talk about this if other conferences are talking about— like, I think I remember one year where everybody was just obsessed with Docker and I was just like, okay, unless it’s a new spin on it, like, we’ve talked about Docker and how-tos over and over again, like—

Bridget: [00:25:36] That was 2015, right?

Jam: Yeah. And then the other one that, you know, you have to watch for but can get really sneaky at times is when you have the presentation that’s actually a sales pitch. It annoys me, it annoys other people. Please don’t do it. Like, literally, there are so many other ways that you can name-drop your product in the talk and it still be relevant and it still be, like, DevOps Days friendly and not turn into an hour-long sales pitch.

Matty: PagerDuty, that was not a good way to do it.

Jam: I mean, PagerDuty has done some stuff too, like, that are security relevant, has PagerDuty on the logo. Like, even Even I’m a little bit, like, even I’ve done it where I’ve given a talk and it has included a demo of my product, but it wasn’t the focus of the talk. Like, in doing even CFPs and submitting something, I remember one time my company did try to submit a talk for me, didn’t know about it, and then they ended up getting a response back from people saying, this is too sales pitchy. If, like, and we know this person, so, Can you have them submit it? Because this sounds like a sales pitch. This does not sound like them. So, like, being genuine. Like, if it is sales pitchy, it’s not gonna go anywhere.

Matty: [00:26:58] You can vary— just thinking about my time before PagerDuty, this is still true, but I gave lots of talks and never was selling Chef. But there’s little sneaky things you do, and they’re not to be sneaky, but it’s stuff like, hey, I’m Matt. I work at Chef. Now let’s talk about some DevOps. And you’re like, oh, he works at Chef. And I might use Chef to illustrate a point because, hey, that might be the best way I know how to show it. But it doesn’t mean that I’m up there doing my demo like I do for prospects.

Jam: Yeah, exactly. Like, here’s how this will fix all your problems. And it’s like, no, like, no.

Bridget: Yeah, like, I work at Microsoft. They issued me a Mac and my job is to get people to use Linux on Azure. From which we can conclude that 2018 is weird.

Jam: It’s not weird.

Bridget: But it’s weird, right? But when I’m doing Kubernetes workshops, I say, I work at Microsoft. They very kindly provided a bunch of free Linux instances on Azure for me to run this open source workshop for you. That is the last you’re going to hear of Microsoft. And like, that’s the, you know, then the workshop is all the stuff on container.training. And I think it’s important when, back to the picking of content, When I’m putting a workshop pitch together, you know, like, hey, I’m submitting this to a conference, it’s really useful for people to be able to tell that you, yeah, you’ve thought through the fact that, yeah, you work at a vendor, but this is what the content’s gonna be and this is not a product pitch. It helps the organizers if they see that, yeah, they work at a vendor, but they also understand that.

Matty: [00:28:28] Showing that awareness is, it will get you further.

Jam: And it’s also just good, like, developer relations if you’re not just all about your product 24/7. Like, if you’re just about the technical aspects or about the relevancy of the conference first, then that is more important with building relationships, especially if you’re also sponsoring the conference. Like, you don’t want people to be like, oh, man, that person— Like, I just got 2 of these.

Christian: Absolutely. Getting back to logistics of selecting talks, I know that, you know, and again, I’m coming back to this because Madison is significantly smaller than Minneapolis and Chicago, and if people want the awesome Minneapolis or awesome Chicago experience, they can go there. And, you know, Madison has— every tech community has its own what it needs to know or what the people are interested in. So we have kind of gone through and we did the whole meeting in person and have a spreadsheet and everything. And it’s worked well enough for us, sort of. But so agreed, having a single vision of what the conference is going to be tracking down is nice. We’ve also found, I think, that Madison needs a different set of talks, a different set of whatever, than one of the other larger conferences. And so getting to see that and figure out what the community is looking for is really fascinating.

Bridget: [00:30:15] Yeah, I think that’s super key, right? Because every single community has slightly different enterprises there, has slightly different nonprofits there, it has slightly different academic communities and government communities. Like, every community is going to be a little bit different. Obviously, there are commonalities, but making sure that as a local DevOps Days organizer, you’re curating things that are specific to your community is pretty important. And that applies to the sponsor wrangling too, right? Because what kind of local sponsors, you know, were you dealing with here that weren’t necessarily at every DevOps Days, but they were here.

Debbie: Target, for one. Target’s a big one. Optum. I’m trying to think who—

Bridget: Merrill. SPS Commerce.

Debbie: Yes, SPS is another one. And, I mean, they’re very involved in the tech community.

Bridget: And Cargill. I assure you, Cargill does not sponsor every DevOps Days. They are not a vendor in the space, but they very much would like to hire all of you. And that’s, I think that’s something that like we have to be thinking about our local community, not just what’s happening at other events. Like the employers in Madison are not the same as the employers in Chicago are not the same as the employers in Minnesota. And with that, I think it’s kind of funny that only 2 of us, only the Minneapolis ones on the stage, are the local organizers who actually You know, we live in Minneapolis, we run DevOps Days Minneapolis. Uh, Stratton, tell us what’s up with you.

Matty: [00:31:48] Yeah, so, um, I’m in progress of moving cross-country. So moving— so I moved to San Francisco on Saturday. My stuff will be there in a couple weeks, and it’s, uh, kind of maybe temporary, maybe who knows what, but it’s— it is a change. And that is a really good point about how, as much as I glibly was like, well, I can’t give up running DevOps Days Chicago because it’s this thing I’ve done for 5 years and I helped build. It’s not just about the logistics of, oh, it’s fine, I haven’t been, I could be on conference calls, but not sitting and literally physically being in the community is potentially a challenge around that. And we’ll just have to see if I just let my ego get in the way and decide to do it anyway.

Bridget: There might be an opening in Silicon Valley.

Matty: Yeah. Well, there’s a whole bunch of shifting that’s happening right here.

Jam: Yeah, it’s shifting. And then there’s also opportunities to put it in different areas. I know one of the things that was always talked about, at least when I was running Silicon Valley, is that a whole lot of people in San Francisco and Oakland were like, I don’t want to drive an hour down south to come to this event. It’s like, I want something closer to me. So, Matt.

Matty: [00:33:05] That’s true. We’re not in the days of when we thought Minneapolis and Chicago would cannibalize each other. I mean, heck, Madison’s right in between and we all do fine.

Christian: So it’s great. But yeah, relatedly, I myself am leaving Madison and moving to Chicago to be with my partner. And yeah, this is pretty great.

Matty: It really is. It’s the law of conservation of organizing. So it works out good. So then Christian can just take my spot. I’ll take Jam’s spot. Come and join Minneapolis.

Bridget: Yeah, you know, we are always open to having input from people, even if they do not want to, you know, sit in the organizing registration booth all day or anything.

Matty: I heard that at first, is we’re always open to get input from people, even if they don’t want to. This is working with AJ.

Bridget: But even if they don’t want— well, that’s true. I do kind of say, you’re running a DevOps Days, right?

Christian: That does sound very familiar.

Bridget: All right. We’re almost out of time, so I would love to end on each of us. And maybe I’ll, because I love putting people on the spot, I’ll start with Stratton, just so that, that way, we’re not putting people on the spot, and we’ll just go down the row. Each of us, your best advice to somebody who thinks they might want to get involved with, or potentially even spin up from scratch, one of these DevOps Days things. What’s your best advice to them?

Matty: [00:34:26] Those are 2 different questions. Right. So, I’m going to answer the second one. So, this is my advice of if you want to start your own DevOps Days. I will quote the great Nathan Harvey, and I will say, don’t, which is usually— but in all seriousness, if you’re going to start your own DevOps Days, do not reinvent the wheel. The first time you do it, there’s a formula. The formula works for a reason. Little hint, in Chicago, we’re like, we’re going to do it the same way as everybody else just this year, but then we’ll mix it up. It took us like 4 years before we changed anything, and we’re still not sure. About the changes. So, use the people who have made mud pies before you, use the rest of the organizers all across the world who can help you.

Jam: Don’t do it alone. Have a buddy to do it with, at least one person. Like, I cannot stress that enough as a person who has run DevOps Days and also just run events in general. You need, like, at least 2 people. At least 2.

Bridget: We require 3, actually.

Jam: [00:35:28] You require 3? Okay, cool. I didn’t know that. 3. So you require a team to do this, but like in that thing, remember you’re a part of a team. And so like there might be some, some egos that you might need to let down, and that’s okay.

Debbie: My advice would be do it. I mean, it’s a little scary at first and overwhelming, and, and that’s the way it is, but it’s also super cool and it’s a great way to meet new people and get into the community, and I’m really happy that I joined and helped out this year.

Christian: Attend a meetup or volunteer and get organizing that way is the easiest way to go about it, I think.

Bridget: Yeah, and with that, I’ll just say that if you happen to be, say, Chicago-based or Madison-based or perhaps Twin Cities-based, and you find that you want to help with this sort of stuff, Swarming the stage right now and telling us that you want to do things will completely fall out like a buffer overflow because I have no energy for that at this very moment. But we very much would like to hear from you either on the survey that we’re going to send out or come to the local meetup. We run a local meetup. It is excellent because getting involved with your local community or with your other regional communities is really great for the community. And it’s really great for you, and it’s fun.

Matty: [00:36:54] DevOps Day Chicago is August 28th and 29th, and we probably— not probably, we certainly could use some volunteers. So, come ask me about it, and I’ll tell you who to talk to, probably. So, that was a really strong way to go out. So, let’s go out in our normal way. Really excited about having done this show. You know, thank you, Jam, Debbie, Christian, for joining us. Awesome panel. This again is one of my favorite DevOps Days. I’m glad to be part of it. I still remember back that first one when in an auditorium and there are people sitting up on top and when the evening event was on the lawn of SPS Commerce and I think it rained.

Bridget: There was very squishy sections of the grass.

Matty: Yes, very squishy. But we’re Arrested DevOps. You can find out all about our podcast at arresteddevops.com. You can subscribe in iTunes or Google Play and all those fun places. Leave us a review. We like to read those sometimes. Eventually, we might read one on the air.

Bridget: Matt likes to read them. I read nothing.

Matty: [00:37:54] Yeah, they exist. But anyway, so I’m Matty, @mattystratton.

Bridget: And I’m Bridget, @bridgetkremhout.

Matty: We’re Arrested DevOps, and remember, there’s always DevOps in the banana stand. You can, you can clap. It’s okay.