On Tuesday, I drove up to Chicago for the DevOpsDays event there. I’d never been to one, but they gave me a nice discount after rejecting my talk proposal, and it’s only a few hours, so I decided “why not?” I’m not really in the DevOps space anymore (to the degree I ever was), so I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up. But the good news is that I was!
First, though, I want to tell you about a little DevOops I had. The bathrooms in the venue are fancy. They have bottles of mouthwash and little disposable cups for people who want to have minty fresh breath. I only discovered this after I washed my hands. I reflexively reached for the bottle on the counter and scrubbed dutifully. Then I realized my hands were minty fresh. I was sure to use the soap the rest of the day.
The morning had several good talks. Reid Savage gave a talk called “anti-devops.” They included such concepts as “transparency is bad,” “silos are good,” and “stop shipping iteratively.” While that might sound contrarian, it was not. Reid’s point was more of “you can have too much of a good thing.” They were the source of my favorite notes:
Transparency without clarity is bad. “I really need to pee” is providing transparency. “Do you see a bathroom nearby?” is providing clarity.
Paul Czarkowski gave a talk about running private AI on home infrastructure. He was mostly able to do live demos, which is always a risky proposition. He also said something that I want to tattoo on a lot of people’s foreheads: “Anytime you ask an AI a question, you need to be able to think critically about the response.”
The final full-length talk of the morning came from Annie Hedgpeth. Her talk explained professional networking with an analogy to systems networking. Like her, I’ve found that the relationships are more important to my career than the technical problems I’ve solved. As she said, “Like disaster recovery, professional relationships are an ongoing practice, not an emergency response.”
Just before the lunch break, there was a series of ignite talks. These are short talks with auto-advancing slides. I have a lot of speaking experience, but the thought of doing an ignite talk gives me a sense of dread. I have a ton of respect for anyone willing to get on stage and deliver a talk of any quality, but these were all good. I bought a copy of Robert Snyder’s Innovation Portfolio because I was intrigued by his “five verbs” concept. Expect a Duck Alignment Academy post on that someday.
After lunch, we had open sessions. I proposed one on supply chain security that I called “the next log4shell happened and I do or do not know what to do next.” I also attended one on reusable workflows (do they make us dumber?) and one on communicating with executives. All three had great conversations.
On top of all of the great professional content, I was also able to spend a few minutes catching up with a couple of folks I haven’t seen since the Before Times. It was great to see Jamie and Matty again. Hopefully it won’t be half a decade until the next time.
This was the 10th DevOpsDays Chicago, and I’m looking forward to the 11th. Now that I have a better sense for the vibe, I’m motivated to tweak my proposal and give a future event a try. Perhaps Des Moines or Detroit later this year?
