DevOpsDays 2015 Year In Review With John Willis

Matty, Trevor and Bridget finally get John Willis on the show, after pestering him since practically the beginning. John has been to more DevOpsDays than anyone else in the room and sits on the core team with Bridget, so the conversation is part history lesson, part organizer's handbook and part year in review. Along the way it gets to burnout, diversity and the code of conduct, and John says burnout beat any technology discussion he saw this year.

What a DevOpsDays Is

John gives the short version. It grew out of BarCamps and open spaces, and Patrick, whom John calls the godfather of DevOps and of DevOpsDays, ran the first one in Ghent in 2009 out of frustration that he couldn't get the organizations he approached to address devs and ops working together. John says he was probably the only American there. He had been listening to a podcast about agile operations when he almost had an accident, so taken was he with the idea.

The format is usually two days. Mornings have invited keynotes and talks chosen through a CFP, and afternoons are open spaces where attendees make up their own topics and sit in circles. What John loved from the start was the lack of ego, after an early career in rooms full of people with medals of honor who couldn't have a technical conversation: "it seems like everybody checks their ego at the door." Matty has his own version of the podcast-in-the-car story, listening to DevOps Cafe, yelling at the radio that this could never work at Apartments.com, and then hearing Jez tell the HP LaserJet firmware story.

From One Event to 22

The first DevOpsDays was in 2009, and there were two big ones in 2010, and the plan was to tolerate only two a year, one in Europe and one in Silicon Valley next to Velocity. John says that in the early years only a quarter to a third of the room were first-timers, and the Silicon Valley event was mostly a reunion of the same people. Now, with 22 events this year, about 75% of any given room is new. That is exciting, John says, though it is a little bittersweet. Silicon Valley decoupled from Velocity this year and had about 80% new people, so "Silicon Valley became like everywhere else," and he missed his usual 20 minutes talking Deming with Ben Rockwood. The upside is local flavor, like the after-party at Target in Minneapolis, and Bridget's "deep dish DevOps" in Chicago.

Matty compares it to Lindy Exchanges from his swing dancing days, which began as local events and turned into the same event with the same traveling DJs in every town. His point is that a DevOpsDays in Des Moines shouldn't be a carbon copy of Minneapolis. Bridget says that is why the core team insists on local organizers, and she mentions a group that wanted to hold a destination DevOpsDays in Las Vegas, which didn't come together.

Venue Horror Stories and How Big to Get

John's cautionary tale is from a few years back. The Silicon Valley event was going to be at Google, and about a month out Google said it wouldn't provide food, then a couple of weeks before it asked every attendee to sign an NDA. The organizers held a red-alert call and moved to a warehouse at the last minute. The next year they tried a hotel, which was a disaster, with a bill that had Patrick calling to ask what in the hell was going on, and John joking that they were about to be hit with "oxygen charges." Bridget adds that "coffee's like $60 a gallon." John's lesson is that volunteers who don't know hotels shouldn't work with them.

Bridget says her partner Joe has worked in hotel event technology for almost 20 years, which is why the second Minneapolis event, at a hotel with about 370 people, went smoothly. The first was at a university and they outgrew it, partly because the breakout rooms were on different floors from the main hall and each other, and "we didn't really think it would be a problem and we were wrong." John says the proximity of the open space rooms can make the difference between good and great, and tells of a New York event where the discussion was half done by the time you walked to the room.

On size, Matty says Chicago has sold out both years, that about 90% of people register in the last two weeks, and that keeping it around 300 means you could talk to everybody and everyone shares the same morning. Bridget doesn't think DevOpsDays has to cap at 300, and says Austin is bigger and it depends on local needs. For a first event, she suggests looking at your local meetup's attendance, since you might get three to four times as many people. Matty and John both advise following the standard format the first time, which Matty frames as the shu-ha-ri idea: "First it's obey, then detach." Chicago stuck with the template the first year and ended up with what Matty calls "exactly bog-standard DevOpsDays," and John adds that Austin, which has run five, took some heat for going to dual tracks.

Microsoft Comes to DevOpsDays

Trevor is the one host who has never organized one. He has been to parts of two Chicagos and spoke at the second, nervous about talking open source to Microsoft people, and says the crowd was warm anyway. He had also submitted a talk for the first Chicago, and sat in the next room listening to the organizers decide not to include it. Matty says, "I fought for you," and that it was the top call.

That leads John to Jeffrey Snover, whose talk was rejected at an early Silicon Valley DevOpsDays because it was from Microsoft, even though John and Damon had had him on DevOps Cafe and were pushing for him. On their pre-call, John and Snover discovered they had both worked with Tivoli. As John tells it, Snover was told he couldn't work on what became PowerShell, took a demotion and did it anyway. Matty offers the opposing thought that Snover said on this show that the fight created his resolve, and John gives the Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty comparison. Now Microsoft presentations and sponsorships are common at DevOpsDays, "as it should be," and Snover has keynoted Amsterdam. Matty says he has already put him in Austin.

The Year in Events

Trevor made only Chicago. Bridget spoke in New York, ran Minneapolis, and showed up in Silicon Valley for about an hour at a sponsor booth. Matty spoke at the first DevOpsDays Rockies in Denver, did an Ignite in Minneapolis, helped run Chicago again, and gave a talk and an Ignite in Detroit. John did 10 in 2015, including Paris, New York, Austin and Amsterdam, and says his heart is in Austin, where the organizers are family.

He also loved the first government DevOpsDays in Washington, DC, at the US Patent Office, which Nathan Harvey put together. Nathan was his champion for a keynote on the history of DevOps, and most of the talks were from people inside government agencies fighting the same battles. John's favorite of the year was Minneapolis: a day early at the Target DevOps Dojo, a lineup with Mary Poppendieck, and an Ignite by his 12-year-old son on R and data science. Matty followed that Ignite with slides about a Markov bot built from Pete Cheslock's tweets and wondered what kind of jackass he was, though John's kids couldn't stop talking about the bot.

Burnout

The theme John cares about most started at SCaLE early in the year, when he learned that a young man from the community, whom he had gotten to know over a few years, had died. He couldn't get it out of his mind for a week. He wrote a blog post about burnout that ran on the IT Revolution blog and got a big reaction, and was then asked to give a keynote on it in New York. Someone who spoke after him, about his own anxiety, told John the article gave him the courage to do it.

Burnout open spaces followed. In Austin, Josh Corman asked a circle of 40 or 50 people how many had seen a therapist, and about 30% raised their hands. John wondered aloud how many would have done so four or five years earlier, and Josh answered, "how many people 40 minutes ago would have raised their hand." Three Velocities in a row have run a burnout session. John says he stopped giving the keynote because he didn't want to capitalize on a tragedy, and that the upside is that "things that were possibly hidden in a closet" are now being discussed. Bridget says she likes the idea of creating humane spaces, so that we don't forget the humanity of people doing this work.

Complexity, Diversity, and the Code of Conduct

John's other two themes are complexity, with Cynefin, cybernetics, OODA loops and Jeff Sussna's book Designing Delivery all tying feedback loops to complexity, and diversity. He tells Bridget that a post she wrote after her first DevOpsDays Silicon Valley changed how he saw things. After a great event, somebody said the ops guys should go to dinner, and she wrote about how bad that made her feel, and John realized how bad he would feel if he had done that to her. He says the community is doing better than most, "but we still suck." Bridget notes that a devopsdays.org event needs a code of conduct: "we won't merge your PR without a code of conduct."

John relays a conversation with a woman in tech who told him everyone talks about getting more women into STEM but nobody talks about keeping them, and he says a Docker core maintainer was hit with harassment from trolls this year. Matty recalls the Minneapolis open space intro, where John, in a single expletive-laden sentence, told whoever was harassing someone in the community to knock it off, and Jon Cowie's talk the next day ended in a 10-minute rant on why.

John's code of conduct story is from the Ghent reunion in 2014. Someone made a bad remark during an Ignite, several people went to Patrick, and the speaker then asked for three minutes on stage to apologize and did. John says the guy wasn't evil, just not being empathetic, and it self-corrected. Bridget calls that blamelessness in action, and says it is the spirit of DevOpsDays.

Come Anyway

Bridget's closing point is that "there isn't going to be a done because this is a journey," and that the community is at least looking at itself. John says Jeff Sussna's line "DevOps is empathy" is one he wishes he had thought of, and that it means being bold enough to say in a room full of more experienced people that you don't think Docker works that way, without hearing shut up, you have one year of experience. He tells enterprise people drowning in buzzwords to come to a DevOpsDays and hear practitioners tell real stories about what works and what doesn't.

Matty points to Cora Hays-Magan, whose first DevOpsDays in Chicago was the first day of her dev boot camp and who wrote about it. Bridget's last word is that you don't have to be John Willis or Bridget Kromhout or Matt Stratton, or even Trevor, to run a DevOpsDays, and if you want to run one in your town, the core team can help.

• Hipster DevOps Happens To The Best Of Us
• DevOpsDays Organizing Guide
• DevOps Cafe Episode with Jeffrey Snover
• The First Rule Of DevOps Club (Bridget's blog post referenced by John)
• Jon Cowie's rant at DevOpsDays Minneapolis 2015
• DevOpsDays As A Newbie by Cora Hays-Magan