devopsdays Salt Lake City 2018

Matty records live at devopsdays Salt Lake City 2018, the third year for the event, with Nicole Forsgren as co-host. Matty's first time in Utah came with a talk called How to Infect Your Organization with Humane Ops, about making on-call more humane when you're not the person running the whole IT organization. Nicole, a former professor at Utah State, keynotes the next day. The guests are Wes Novack, a systems engineer at Pluralsight, Chris from Qualtrics, organizer Jason Vance, and Matthew Barlocker, whose company Blue Matador is a first-time sponsor.

On-Call, Culture and Aha Moments

Wes is on a second devopsdays Salt Lake City, and says last year's takeaway was the realization "we are doing things well," while this year has been more specific. Matty likes the event's practice of asking attendees for an aha moment after a talk, and gives a model of one: "interrupts actually caused me to lose productivity for 45 minutes," as against liking the Star Wars slides. Nicole recalls Alice Goldfuss's on-call selfies as a way to make a lonely practice visible. Matty remembers on-call at a bank, when the requirement to reach a terminal within five minutes meant staying home all weekend and not walking the dog more than a couple of blocks away.

Wes says Pluralsight has autonomous product teams that own applications all the way into production and carry their own on-call, and are decoupled enough that cascading failures are rare, since each team owns a vertical slice from front end to database. Wes took away from Matty's talk the idea of having the business conversation about noisy, non-actionable alerts, turning off monitoring that isn't worth making actionable. Matty adds that people assume the answer will be no, and says to push back with information reasonable people understand, such as "we have to invest time in this flapping alert because right now it's having us fly blind."

A First Conference

Chris, on Qualtrics' data platform, working on automation and alerting, came because a friend at Elastic mentioned going and the manager said to expense it. It's Chris's first tech conference, after seven years at Qualtrics and a narrow echo chamber. An aha moment was the idea that "complexity leads to fragility": a system launched before it was ready took about eight months to stabilize, and the fix reduced complexity, moving from very fine-grained message handling to a per-database queue with fairness protocols. Nicole calls it a smart tradeoff, and says Qualtrics is known for data-driven releases and got its start among professors. Chris hopes to submit a talk this year.

Organizing

Jason says the event improved by documenting everything last year, holding a live retrospective with the staff, and having a stable board, with most members there three years running and one person as dedicated CFO. The conference is about 70% funded by sponsors, with only two new vendors, and "repeat offenders" the rest. Jason's wish for the future: "Not plan it during a major security conference." Matty notes there are over 50 devopsdays that year, so avoiding overlap with other events is not always possible, and mentions Chicago's past conflict with VMworld and this year's with GopherCon. Matty also asks attendees to visit the sponsors, even without a demo.

Sponsoring a devopsdays

Matthew describes Blue Matador as "a recommendation engine" for proactive monitoring, aimed at getting ahead of reactive alerting, and works near the venue. The story in the morning keynote minute: Matthew was in the hospital with a newborn son when a former employer called, in a very Star Wars-esque manner saying "help us, you're our only hope," and later got an alert at a family sledding outing. Matty jokes that a tool should recommend whom to page based on who is doing the least important thing.

Matthew has been to the first devopsdays Salt Lake City at a different venue, and it's the first time working a booth, as an introvert. Matty and Matthew say big conferences are "trick-or-treat," with attendees collecting swag, while devopsdays visitors want to talk, helped by a sponsor passport with a drawing for stamps. Matty recalls an old manager's spouse saying Chef was "a t-shirt design company who also sold software."

State of DevOps and Accelerate

Nicole asks listeners to take the State of DevOps survey, about 20 minutes and open until June 8th, covering monitoring and observability, cloud platform, database and reliability, this year in partnership with Google Cloud. Nicole's book Accelerate, on the science of lean software and DevOps, launched March 27th, and VictorOps sponsored a book signing with free copies.

Matty chats with Nicole Forsgren, Wes Novack, a shadowy figure known only as Chris from Qualtics, Jason Vance, and Matthew Barlocker in front of a live studio audience at devopsdays Salt Lake City 2018.

• Matty's talk at devopsdays Salt Lake City 2018
• Nicole's book: Accelerate

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