Deserted Island DevOps 2021

Matty talks with nine organizers and speakers of the second Deserted Island DevOps, the DevOps conference held in Animal Crossing, which Matty calls a personal favorite virtual event. The organizers are Austin Parker, a developer advocate at LightStep, and Katy, a technical community manager at CircleCI who emceed. The speakers are Ana Margarita Medina, a senior chaos engineer at Gremlin, Rin Oliver, a technical community builder at Camunda, Angelina Uno-Antonison, a software architect at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, Arri Blais, a senior software engineer at Embark Vet, Jack Knives, lead DevOps engineer at Moda Operandi, Laura Santamaria, a developer advocate at LogDNA, and Serena Tiede, an SRE at UnitedHealth Group. The cold open is Katy: "I just love hyping people up, Matty."

What Changed in Year Two

Austin says the idea was the same: a virtual event in a deliberately constrained virtual space, with the constraints meant to inspire creativity. Austin announced it way ahead of time so fear of failure couldn't talk them out of it. This year added more production value, artwork and merch, and turned last year's charity shoutouts into a fundraiser for The Trevor Project, with a ticker during the event. Austin says it raised over $6,000, though the turnout wasn't the hit Austin expected. Angelina says the ticker made the event mean something more, and Austin says the commitments of no entrance fee, free on Twitch and accessible with transcription are founding concepts, and that getting all those people together means you can probably ask them to give.

Katy says as emcee there's no off mode, and introducing people talking about what they're passionate about brings joy. Katy ran a dedications line in a Discord channel, reading people's shout-outs aloud in a radio voice, since Katy once wanted to be a radio DJ. Austin also says introductions use fun facts in place of bios, which was accidental last year and is now deliberate, since a first-time speaker's short bio next to someone with a page of accomplishments invites implicit bias. Matty says devopsdays Chicago stopped having MCs do intros for a similar reason, since MCs know some speakers and not others.

The Talks

Ana, a first-time speaker, only started Animal Crossing around November or December of 2020, and had trouble with the abstract. Ana zoomed out from reliability to interpersonal things, like checking on neighbors and building trust and safety in teams, and tied it to reliability with the example of buying two axes because your tool will break. Rin's talk was on community and resilience, arguing resilience means having the tools to handle pain in a way that suits you and has to be worked at, like Roald, a villager who loves working out. Rin liked that the event was on Twitch in Animal Crossing and not just Zoom.

Angelina spoke about Apache Kafka, themed with Animal Crossing and a dinner party, partly to make it less intimidating for the computational biologists at a monthly meeting, and partly because burnout had made Angelina not want to give talks, so a video game theme was a way to do it differently. Based on feedback, Angelina will keep using it. Arri gave a talk on getting started with accessibility advocacy, since people often don't know how to begin, and liked that the conference mixes soft skills and technical talks. Matty and Arri compare single-track and multi-track conferences. Jack, a first-time public speaker who submitted a throwaway proposal in two minutes, spent two weeks on drafts and dry runs and an hour in GIMP making slide patterns, and is proudest of the line "Blathers was the developer because he's afraid of bugs." Laura's talk covered the dangers of third-party tooling, and Laura live-tweeted the whole event. Serena planned a technical talk about running Jaeger that turned into one about making friends with tracing.

Lessons From the Production

Austin says the production lesson is to tell speakers which side of the screen to stand on: the scenes assumed people would stand on the left, the first speaker stood on the right, and everyone mirrored, so Austin was furiously panning the camera. This year the slide inset was wider, about 800 pixels against 600 the year before, and speakers were asked to make text bigger. Matty suggests a set of best practices for speakers, including having someone else run the reactions. Laura says the Q&A after a prerecorded talk, with the speaker still in Zoom and Katy relaying questions from Discord, felt more like in person than typing into a chat. Laura and others note that participants were engaged, with watch parties on other islands and new channels, including one that spun off an ADHD ops discussion, which Serena says a platform like Discord handles better than others.

Resilience

Katy says last year had energy from the start of the pandemic, while this year the talks were more needed, messages of wholesome resilience. Austin says it's a story about resilience and shares something not widely known: LightStep had layoffs on April 30, 2020, the day of the first event, and Katy was affected and was offered an opt-out of hosting. Katy says, "don't you dare take this from me," and that Deserted Island got Katy through that, gave Katy a new community and friends, and "pretty sure it got me my next job." Austin says it was one of the hardest days professionally, and that this year Austin repeatedly doubted doing it again because the mood had changed, but decided to "take the limitations, take the things that suck and compress them into a tiny ball of suck, and then try to put that tiny ball over to the side and fill that space with good."

Serena and Arri's advice for other events is Discord's hallway-track feel and building a helpful, wholesome community. Katy asks people to watch the YouTube videos and follow the speakers on Twitter.

Melody: melody.dev