DevOpsDays DFW 2016

Trevor records a "supershow" at the very first DevOpsDays Dallas, combining Arrested DevOps with the Food Fight Show and Software Defined Talk, so the panel is a mix of hosts, organizers and audience. Nathen Harvey co-hosts Food Fight, Coté (Michael Coté) does Software Defined Talk and works at Pivotal, and Michael and Annie Hedgpeth are two of the organizers. Michael is a software architect at NCR working on DevOps for its hospitality group, and Annie is a new cloud automation engineer at 10th Magnitude, Trevor's employer. Dillon Culpepper, a developer at Code Authority who works in .NET and Azure, is an attendee. The show opens with Coté noting that "if you're up on your myth, heroes always get brutally punished."

Building a First DevOpsDays

Annie says they had a little over 300 people, with everything going off without a hitch, and they wanted to be Texan but different from Austin, which has a huge DevOpsDays. Annie adds that many attendees were new to DevOps, and there were people around to mentor them. Michael says the reward is realizing the months of work helped people change their lives, and when Nathen asked on day one who was at their first conference, people stood up. The show-of-hands exercise, repeated for the recording, gives about 20 of 100 who had been to a DevOpsDays before.

Michael tells how the organizing came about: a local group called DevOps Live decided on a DevOpsDays, and Michael had read an old email from Doug Ireton about a conference open space where a bullet point said DevOpsDays needs more women organizers. Annie was looking at a career transition, and Michael suggested organizing, since Annie "can organize a conference." Annie became the sponsor liaison and raised money from about 25 sponsors. Michael watched the kids on Wednesday nights during Annie's sponsor meetings, and three weeks in got a text asking if Michael wanted to handle speakers and emcee.

One Track, Many Backgrounds

Nathen was adamant about a single track. When you have choices, you go where you're comfortable, and Nathen heard people say they never would have gone to a networking automation talk, but they got a lot out of it. Michael, who had only been to Austin's multi-track event, mixed technical and culture talks on purpose and picked speakers from networking, security and development backgrounds. It's about empathy and common ground for faster delivery, and Nathen adds: "Imagine a DevOps conference where there was a dev track and an ops track." Dillon, who normally focuses on Microsoft subjects, found the exposure to different speakers surprising and delightful.

A Local Community Event

Nathen says the first DevOpsDays in a city is special because the community has two days to gel, and 90 to 95% of the audience lived within 40 miles. Coté says a lot of business and IT happens in North Texas and few people know it, and likes talking to "normal people doing normal things," since heroes are heroic and that gets boring. Trevor says the weekend brought a first: Dillon recognized Trevor from the podcast, which recalled the experience of meeting people Trevor admired, and it was the first conference where Trevor felt past imposter syndrome and unafraid to share thoughts.

Audience members share their reactions. Reuben Garrett, a Unix sysadmin at IBM SoftLayer, attending a first professional conference, wanted more technical talks but was glad for JJ's Ignite on introverts at conferences and a talk about empowering women in tech. Jean Bennett had been to many conferences but never a DevOpsDays, and the single track and open space worked well even though Jean isn't very technical. Jean is "a talkative introvert." Clay Schroeder of CBRE brought nine people, which would have been hard in Austin with travel and hotels. Michael says at NCR only a small group gets sent to conferences on planes, and this one had no hotel and an inexpensive ticket. Annie says leftover sponsor money can go back into DevOps Live to keep the community going.

Local Celebrities and First Talks

Michael says the mix of speakers, including Franklin Mosley, whose security talk was a first at any conference, made the event more engaging than an all-heroes lineup, since the authenticity engaged the audience. Trevor says DevOpsDays is a great place to give a first talk, and that Trevor's was at ChefConf after about three weeks of Chef work, which was much more intimidating than a smaller venue would have been. Nathen says "you should build local celebrities within that meetup" instead of flying in people with name recognition.

Confusion, Learning, and Empathy

Coté values meeting people who think differently about obvious things, and says it's fun to sort out the confusion on both sides. Coté recalls introducing Scrum at BMC around 2003 or 2004, when as a snarky young developer Coté figured they were replacing nothing, since nothing existed. Nathen says some attendees ended the first day asking what exactly DevOps is, and the answer on stage was that it's a journey, not something you finish after 18 months. Dillon found the most clarity in open spaces, since people shared similar problems and Dillon heard three or four different valid answers.

Michael and Annie stayed up until midnight after the kids went to bed working on InSpec profiles and pull requests, and Michael realized that "when you know something and you become the expert, you start to forget what it's like to learn it, and you lose empathy for people." Watching Annie struggle with something obvious to Michael made Michael a better change agent. Trevor says teaching others Chef while still green did the same for Trevor. Michael adds "you kind of don't learn empathy until you come across somebody who's disagreeing with you."

Getting Your Boss to Come

Michael asks how to get bosses to attend, and Coté says to figure out their motivations and goals, and either free up their barriers or be persuasive that unless management is involved it won't work at scale. Coté suggests giving them permission to attend, getting them on a panel like a hot dog on a string, sending them recorded talks, and writing up your conference notes as things to do here, not just what happened, and being ready for homework. Nathen suggests inviting managers to speak at a meetup to say what keeps them up at night, and points to books like The Phoenix Project as an audiobook and Mark Schwartz's book on business value, at 98 pages, and the DevOps Enterprise Summit. Annie suggests finding three or four of the boss's pain points and solving one in a DevOps way with a tiny project.

An audience member asks when you reach success with DevOps. Nathen gives the definition that Adam and Nathen use: "DevOps is a cultural and professional movement focused on how we build and operate high-velocity organizations built from the experiences of its practitioners." Nathen isn't sure all of NCR is bought in, but Michael is doing DevOps, and they treat it as planting the flag. Michael cites Toyota Kata: on Monday, set a target two weeks out in the direction of the goal state, like having lunch with someone to ask their pain points and mapping them to what automation could solve, and then create win after win. Nathen ends by saying that when you reach a milestone, stop to market and share it across the organization, and that you'll feel like you're telling the same story again and again, which is fine, since you're telling it to fresh ears.