Deserted Island DevOps

Matty talks with the organizers and speakers of Deserted Island DevOps, the DevOps conference held inside Animal Crossing a few weeks earlier, in what Matty calls the most simultaneous guests the show has had in an episode it will release. The organizers are Austin Parker, a developer advocate at LightStep, and Katy Farmer, a free-range developer advocate. The speakers are Ian Coldwater, a lead platform security engineer at Heroku, Dave Sudia, a senior DevOps engineer at GoSpotCheck, Kat Cosgrove, a developer advocate at JFrog, Jacquie Grindrod, a developer advocate at HashiCorp, Mia Moore, a developer advocate at IBM, Adrienne Tacke, a developer advocate at MongoDB, and Aaron Aldrich, a developer advocate at LaunchDarkly. Several lines in the transcript are labeled only "Participant," so this summary attributes only what's labeled. The cold open is Austin: "It's amazing what you can do in 30 days and someone with 50,000 Twitter followers."

How It Happened

Austin says it happened because Austin and Katy were bored. With COVID, they started Twitch streams, and Katy's idea was a Friday stream about something other than technology, which began with Animal Crossing. Austin joked on Twitter about building a trade show booth in Animal Crossing, someone suggested a conference, and with April 1st the next day Austin put up a web page, planning to call it an April Fool's joke if nobody cared. There were a hundred signups in a day for an event with nothing behind it, and Katy remembers a message saying "I made a joke, but now it's real." Austin calls that the hallmark of a good idea.

Austin says the event was built on the belief that tech events should be accessible in a broad sense: closed captioning, speakers who don't all look alike, and being findable in unexpected places, like Austin's own chance encounters. Austin says conferences like KubeCon or re:Invent are marketing and sales events where learning is a side effect, and Austin was inspired by devopsdays to make something that felt like that but online. Twitch made it easy for people to jump in.

The Keynote

Ian's idea had been a weekly Zoom call for Kubernetes folks who missed the contributor summit turning into an informal meetup in Animal Crossing, not a whole conference. Austin thought bigger, and Ian then got picked for the keynote. Ian had planned a script on the in-game tablet with reactions and costume changes, which fell apart immediately once Ian tried to talk on Zoom, drive slides and use in-game reactions at once. What survived was the tone: warm, positive and welcoming. Ian's keynote was about DevOps and security working together with empathy, and Ian says the reactions and claps from the audience felt more real and supportive than talking into the void on Zoom. Matty adds that the speakers sat in the same Zoom all day, muted, which replicated some connection, and says other organizers should not dismiss this event.

Dave describes it as "the best of the Internet," reminiscent of an old forum, and coordinated real-life and in-game outfits, only to learn the video wouldn't be shared. Dave and Matty both recall long pauses while hunting for the right reaction, and Matty got stuck on one reaction for three minutes without noticing.

Why the Community Worked

Kat says it felt like magic and doesn't know how to recreate it, since virtual expo halls with corporate-branded avatars aren't as intimate as visiting someone's island, where they spent hours and millions of bells on a little movie theater. Kat calls it "the most pure thing I have seen in tech in a long time." A participant who refers to "Katy and I" says much of it was "me getting out of the way": they gave people a space and watch parties came from attendees. Ian pushes back that Austin and Katy did a lot of active work to make the space inclusive, wholesome and accessible, and compares it to open source communities that act with care. Katy says setting that tone attracted the right people and led volunteers to offer to moderate.

Mia says being genuine worked, but it may not be replicable, and that the tone set from the first talk mattered since Twitch chat can get mean. Mia has played Animal Crossing since 2004, and says friends and family watched and finally understood the job. Austin says about 100,000 viewers in total, including many people who weren't Animal Crossing fans or in tech, and at one point the stream ranked third in concurrent Animal Crossing streams. Ian notes a lot of security folks attended who had never been exposed to DevOps culture.

Preparation and Speaker Camaraderie

Kat, intimidated by the speaker list, bought Animal Crossing and wrote the talk two weeks ahead, unusual for someone who usually wings it, and showed up wearing a million-bell crown, having got lucky on the turnip market. Jacquie decided to submit after a team discussion, then got pulled into a three-day hackathon building a videogame, and proposed a talk about building a videogame from inside another videogame. Jacquie says the overlap between DevOps and Animal Crossing is building a space that empowers and welcomes people. Adrienne asked what in Animal Crossing could make awesome parallels and set out to write a CFP too creative to turn down. Katy says there were no bad CFPs and they kept adding talks, and Austin says they did add two more.

Matty notes that Austin set up a Discord before the event, which gave speakers a way to trade slides and titles, something like a speaker dinner. Aaron started with about 60 minutes of content for a 25-minute slot, and calls single track conferences powerful because speakers who see the talks before theirs can tie themselves together and say "go listen to Katy talk about that." Matty says the event changed Matty's mind about prerecorded talks. A participant who works on a Twitch channel for a company's developer content argues that Twitch viewers expect a messier, live experience and that virtual conferences work better if you treat them like you're flying out.

Next Time

Austin wants another big one next year, with shorter Animal Crossing sessions over the summer and possibly other games, joking about Fortnite. Austin says 90 percent of what people saw was done the week before, and that Austin learned enough of a vector illustration tool to make rounded curves, which Matty calls the best DevOps metaphor: learning from doing. Keep an eye on desertedislanddevops.com. Matty plugs Irreverent DevOps Party Games, a live-streamed DevOps game show on Twitch on Tuesday, June 2nd at 8:00 PM Central, with Kat as an early contestant.

Conference content

• Videos of talks on YouTube
• Deserted Island DevOps Postmortem
• Shoutout to Tori Chu who both spoke and did the amazing in-game artwork and swag!

Recaps

• Deserted Island DevOps Wrapup (FireHydrant Blog)
• Deserted Island DevOps Recap (Blameless)

Press coverage

• RedMonk article
• VentureBeat article
• TechCrunch article
• Vice article
• TechRepublic article