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DevOpsDays Boston - Real value of community
929 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of Kubernetes Bytes, Ryan and Bhavin sit down with Paul Bruce and Don Luchini - the organizers of DevOpsdays Boston and talk about the value of community, what DevOps means to them and how the event has evolved over the years.
Listen in to learn more about what to expect when you attend one of these events or meetups in the future, and the guests also share their perspective around DevOps, Kubernetes and Platform Engineering
- Check out the KubernetesBytes website: https://www.kubernetesbytes.com/
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Timestamps:
- 00:00 Interview with Paul Bruce
- 22:25 Interview with Don Luchini
Join the DevOpsDays Boston slack - https://bostondevops.github.io/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:03
Speaker
You are listening to Kubernetes Bites, a podcast bringing you the latest from the world of cloud native data management. My name is Ryan Walner and I'm joined by Bob and Shaw coming to you from Boston, Massachusetts. We'll be sharing our thoughts on recent cloud native news and talking to industry experts about their experiences and challenges managing the wealth of data in today's cloud native ecosystem.
Host's Interests and Sponsorship Details
00:00:31
Speaker
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Interview with Paul Bruce: Community and DevOps
00:01:36
Speaker
All right, Paul, welcome to Kubernetes Bites. We're here live at your baby here, DevOps Days Boston. So please introduce yourself for everybody listening and who you are and what you do. Sure. Thank you, Ryan and Bob. And thank you to the listeners. My name is Paul Bruce. I am one of the organizers for DevOps Days Boston for about five years now. We also have a nonprofit behind that. There's Liability Shield and stuff like that on the board there.
00:02:03
Speaker
And I run the monthly meetup and one of the other organizers is also the moderator of that with me. So it is our baby. That's true. That's right. Yeah. But very much so, it's a labor of love. It's a lot of effort and I wouldn't have it any other way.
00:02:24
Speaker
Right. Because there's a phrase if you've ever heard the bring the pain forward. Yeah. You know, like I think it's great to to be able to come to a community and get value out of it. And there's very few people who understand how much effort it takes to do that. And, you know, like sometimes you're overthinking things.
00:02:45
Speaker
And it's kind of toilsome, but even a lean, simple community, a really thought through community. I don't use the word lightly. Sure. Right. Like I read and listen and talk with other people, other organizers of not just DevOps days, but other events and other meetups. Yeah. I really care about what it really means to be a community. And like the book Art of Community,
00:03:09
Speaker
says it's a group of people that have a mutual interest but also care for each other.
00:03:17
Speaker
And earlier this year, I was out at Delta Place Prague. I know some of the other the organizers there and they invited me out to speak about how we came back after covid around from the covid times in this event, because this is the second year that we're in person back in the place that we were. Right. Nineteen and eighteen. Right. That's right. This is like the 11th time we've been doing this. Yeah. Well, my fifth time. But like it's a thing. And when you realize that there's value to a thing,
00:03:47
Speaker
you don't want to see it just evaporate or disappear. So over the past five years, I have seen more and more value and the more effort I put into it, the more value I get out of it personally, not as much professionally, but really, it's a personal thing.
00:04:05
Speaker
I've also learned how difficult it is to help facilitate, I won't say manage, but facilitate the life cycle of volunteer effort. Volunteer effort is not something you pay somebody for, and then you can be like, you're not doing your job.
00:04:23
Speaker
Right. It's variable. It's highly variable. Like Elia Goldratt would say variation, right, is part of a systems thinking process and systems thinking on community volunteer community is that we need to make it easy for people to enjoy, also participate, provide some value in the value get out is largely value value put in to do that in a way. And I find myself thinking about that lifecycle largely almost like
00:04:54
Speaker
like school, right? Sure. So like there's matriculation, there's retention and there's attrition. I mean, there's also business models that like you care about those things, right? Renewals and stuff like that. Right. Yeah. So it's presence. But how is that present in volunteer stuff?
00:05:12
Speaker
Somebody has to care about that. And again, I could be the only one doing that, but that that's not good because I might have to attrition life events happen. Right. We have to be able to help each other how much we can when we can.
00:05:30
Speaker
And when we can't, that has to be OK, too. So life cycle wise, I was trying to come up with some analogy about Kubernetes, like the pain and suffering I've gone through with trying to get OADC working in AWS two years ago. And maybe it's gotten better. But like, you know, you don't you wouldn't build something super bespoke, which, quite frankly, all communities is bespoke at the end of the day, no matter how hard you try to make it, you know, the same and consistent and stuff like that.
00:06:00
Speaker
But if you've ever tried to hook up account lifecycle stuff into the infrastructure, that's oh, I do see open ID Connect in a way. So I was trying to come up with this analogy of like, but what does that mean for community? And so I've now described what I think from a lifecycle perspective, making it easy for people to be part of a community and contribute to that. Right. And the connector really is
00:06:29
Speaker
We've got this cool bespoke thing in Boston. There's a lot of other communities or sort of just meet ups or whatever it is right in all other places. But to connect people to what they can do and what they're passionate about and what what they enjoy. I wouldn't expect people to put effort in if they're getting no enjoyment out of it. Right.
00:06:51
Speaker
A simple measure that you might use for people I use for myself is, am I getting more value out than I'm putting in?
00:07:07
Speaker
Now, that's tricky because I tend to give more than I get. But it's it's just nice to step back. And, you know, one day it might be one thing, another day, one week, another week. You might have different levels of this, but like taken as an aggregate or a distribution over time, that seems to be happening here.
00:07:27
Speaker
Yeah. Now, this is DevOps stays Boston, but obviously, you know, you go to other conferences as an attendee as well. Do you think it changes your perspective on what you get out of other events because you've helped organize this one? Oh, for sure. The first thing I do is I find organizer staff volunteers.
00:07:47
Speaker
even even contracted service folks, and I'm thinking them more than I'm spending time talking to the other attendees, you know what I mean? Like because I know that every
00:08:00
Speaker
whether people need it or not, whether they know they need it or not, it doesn't hurt to be kind. Yeah, it doesn't hurt to give a little kindness out to the world. Yeah. Right. We even have a wall over here where it's like, you know, love and appreciation. Yeah. And I got that from going to KubeCon of all places. I think it was in twenty twenty one. It was like it was in
00:08:26
Speaker
LA, I think LA. Yeah. Yes. And needs to do it in warm places. It was in the venue that could host like 10,000, 15000 people. I think there was like two or three thousand people there. Yeah. That was
Challenges and Successes of In-Person Events
00:08:36
Speaker
the sad one. That's right. I didn't go to that one. However, right. It was an attempt and we knew we would. They knew that they had to get back into it. We knew that last year. We tried to do both a virtual version and an in-person version right out of COVID times.
00:08:50
Speaker
And that was really tricky. But this year we just decided, let's focus on the in-person stuff. And last year to this year, we grew it more than 150, 170%. So people are coming back out. And we are able to have open spaces in the way that really is powerful.
00:09:10
Speaker
Not that it's impossible virtually, it's just, but learning things from other conferences, that was one of those things at KubeCon was like this big wall of love. Ours is the cheap version, which is like, you know, the post-it cardboard. It's still low. It's still low. You know? And every time I walk by that, you know, there's another post-it on there. It means somebody answered the call. Yeah.
00:09:35
Speaker
Even if it's just writing something nice on a post-it, that is putting value into somebody else's life. And you don't have to measure. You don't have to know where that thing goes. Yeah. So sometimes it helps. But before you mentioned that a common interest isn't just enough for a community, is it those types of things, putting a post on the wall that makes a difference in sort of what people are getting out of a community, what they're giving to that community as well?
00:10:00
Speaker
like a common interest around technology or just DevOps in general. If that's not enough, what what is enough, right? What is enough? Yeah. Also, we should roll back and actually ask the question, what is DevOps?
00:10:15
Speaker
Yeah, I'm just kidding. We could spend another hour and a half, probably. Yeah, for me. And this is what I said to Prague. They were kind enough to invite me out there. And I talked about what it was like to regrow a community after the things happened. And one of the specific points I was trying to make there was. It's a question that we work out together.
00:10:38
Speaker
Now it's very vague in general. Can we apply that to DevOps? Yes. Can we apply that to community? Yes. Can we apply that to the value of post it somewhere that you you don't have any way to measure how many other people benefited from that? That's not the point. Take that moment. You have moments in your life where you can just be like, OK, life doesn't fully suck. Things are going OK today. Sure. I have.
00:11:05
Speaker
a nickel's worth of patience. I have a nickel's worth of kindness that I can spend on somebody else. And I don't have to know who that is. So we also do. So there's a lot of little things around the conference. The conference goers definitely come for the down to earth talks like Cheslak and all the rest of the speakers, like really asking that question, you know, putting some statements out there, but then driving to the open spaces. And over five years, I've realized as much as
00:11:33
Speaker
as much as I love presentations and making sure that people are getting value out of those. And I love our speakers so much. Right.
00:11:42
Speaker
The bigger value of this conference is being able to sit with other practitioners and ask the question and then say the things that you maybe can't say to your boss. Yeah. Or maybe you do and they largely get ignored. Or maybe it's maybe you're trying to work that out at work. Right. Big organization, small startups. It doesn't matter. But like having another mechanism vehicle to be able to work that out for yourself and work it out together.
00:12:13
Speaker
The community is like a puzzle that we put together.
00:12:19
Speaker
together. Nice. Right. Right. It's like that family time. You put all the puzzle pieces down, you flip them over. Everybody's around doing their own part, picking their own corner. Yeah. We put that together and it's going to end up being this bespoke, interesting little thing different in every city, just like the Kubernetes clusters. But connecting that to the way that people can can actually contribute in the most meaningful way. Yeah.
00:12:46
Speaker
Here's one in May, a new meetup member. We do the meetup every month. I make sure that happens. Consistency. One of the new members at the end of it. Was like, oh, so there's leftover food.
00:13:03
Speaker
Are you going to do with it? I was like, well, probably we'll put it in the fridge for the next, you know, next day's staff or whatever. And she said, why don't we donate it? I was like, oh, yeah, I missed that. Yeah. You know, I mean, it wasn't a lot of food because it's just a meet up for then. I kept like 25 people first come first serve.
00:13:25
Speaker
But then I started thinking, OK, if I was going to do this, how do I do this legally, safely? I started doing the engineer thing and making sure I'm, you know, get a break into smaller places around surround myself with context. But it was a trigger to make me ask the question, what is the context I need to do this?
00:13:41
Speaker
And so that led me to understand that the food out there, though I'm not a big fan of bagged lunches like a sandwich and a cookie in a bag. We could probably do better with hot plates and stuff that is completely compatible. Yeah, it increases the compatibility of being able to donate this food afterwards because there are people who are hungry tonight. And that matters a lot to me. And individually, they can have
00:14:08
Speaker
So that's the value I get out. So I'll do the extra little bit of work here and there to figure out and then the now volunteer right now part of our community is here making sure that that happens every night. So that valuable to her. Yeah, valuable to me. We'll figure out how to how to do that and do well by others to.
00:14:29
Speaker
Yeah, I was just speaking with Kevin Schooneman and he's one of the volunteers here yesterday and I caught him towards the end of the day. He goes, I'm going to go help donate this food. So, you know, he was excited to do that. I think he he appreciates that this organization thinks about those things and then he can give back that way, too. Right. So it's nice to hear. Yeah.
00:14:51
Speaker
Sorry, I just wanted to show my appreciation. This is my first DevOps race in Boston, and I really like the balance that you have been able to achieve. Obviously, we can always make it better year over year, but the talks that you have in the morning that led to the open spaces, I see a lot of practitioners in the room actively taking notes, bringing out their notebooks and writing things down because they caught
00:15:13
Speaker
something that can help them in their day job and yeah I've been to other conferences where it's a lot of vendor pitch and people are just checked out but you know people here are really engaged which is awesome yeah I think thank you I think the the other part of this too is because it's volunteer and we're not looking to make money
00:15:30
Speaker
Yeah, on this thing, right? We have a financial plan. We have somebody who knows how to make a financial plan and keep us to it. Yeah. And then when we make that, we're not trying to make even more money like. For what we need to put down payments next year for things at certain times to make this happen. But this is in service of.
00:15:52
Speaker
that goal, not money as a goal. Now, there are other conferences that actually pay people. And there are paychecks that have to be made. And you want people not, you know, to be paid well. Right. So there's business models around that. That's fine. But that is going to gravitate towards very vendor specific, a very sponsor like just cater to sponsors leave.
Inclusivity and Financial Sustainability in Events
00:16:15
Speaker
We don't do in those days.
00:16:18
Speaker
Globally, we don't do lead scanning right like bad scanning leads. We're not
00:16:24
Speaker
It's a PII liability, quite frankly. And it's fair. And we're not trying to make so much money. Yeah. So the sponsors who are here and thank goodness for them, because we wouldn't be able to put this on just by what, ticket sales, which we want to keep as cheap as possible so that more people can and not just people who have been here for many years, which there are. This is the first year we're doing an intro track because another organizer was like,
00:16:52
Speaker
Yeah. So there's a lot of people who need to learn about DevOps. And isn't that the point? Yeah. Who are these people? Not people who have been doing this for four or five years and very interested in burnout because you only get there after about after a certain amount of time in your career. That's that's when you've earned burnout, so to speak. What about the people who are just getting started out of boot camps? And so we've been donating and working with local charities and boot camps.
00:17:20
Speaker
Uh, for many years now, um, to encourage their good work, but there is a gap. And this is one of the things that we, I think we want to do and figure out both at the board level, but also, you know, the, the organizing community of both this event and the meetup and who come.
00:17:38
Speaker
We want to figure out how to help get somebody who has just exited an educational moment But has no experience and yeah, I couldn't hire them You know, I would love to but you know legitimately You need experience and so how do you get that if you don't have that that's a problem Yeah, and that's something that I think we can help solve we can help them to solve we can help us to solve and
00:18:06
Speaker
Yesterday I was up in the main area there and I was speaking to a student from Northeastern. And he was like, I'm here to really to learn, right? And we also just spoke to Alex, one of the speakers. And while he was a speaker, he also said, I'm here to learn.
00:18:22
Speaker
He said, I'm here to learn from the attendees and the open spaces. And so I think it's a common element, whether you're here as a student or someone who's breaking into this world or someone who's actively working on this stuff but is feeling like they could get a lot more out of speaking to people here. And open spaces does bring a lot to the table there. And I know you were actually not so familiar. So it might be helpful to explain a little bit about what an open space is at a conference like this to someone or a listener who
00:18:52
Speaker
Hasn't been to one. Sure. There is an official short version, but this is my even shorter version. OK. People propose topics. And then we figure out how to put that topic in a particular room at a particular time, create a quick schedule. This is also called unconference, so to speak. And then the people who want to talk about that thing go there for a certain amount of time to talk how they want to talk. It's facilitated. I particularly think it should be.
00:19:20
Speaker
facilitated because, you know, somebody like me could go on and on and not even realize it's been five minutes or 10 minutes. Right. So sometimes it's just as easy as saying, cool. Who else has thoughts, you know, and just bouncing the football to somebody else so that we all get to
00:19:39
Speaker
opt into the amount of contribution that we want to, but that there is space and opportunity to do that. Because, you know, a talk is mostly a one way, even with Q&A, it's kind of a one way mechanism, which is fine. Right. That's the point. This is very multi directional. The open spaces are. Yeah. So that's effectively what open spaces is. Great. Talk amongst yourselves.
00:20:05
Speaker
I like that. It's often you go to a talk and you also want to speak to that person who just presented the topic. And it's hard to track them down sometimes, right? It's an open space is you're kind of like everyone can be that speaker, right? Everyone can end. And, you know, obviously there's going to be people there that are here to sort of be a fly on the wall because that's how they learn. Right. And so that's OK as well, because, you know, I think if you have a majority of that room that's going to chime in, then hopefully that's helpful to everybody.
00:20:34
Speaker
Um, well, um, we're, we're at the 20 minute mark. So, you know, as you were talking about that, uh, we don't want to take more of your time. We appreciate you coming down here and letting us do our thing here. Um, and obviously, um, you know, you and the rest of the organizers, thank you from us and, uh, looking forward to the rest of the show. Yeah. Cheers. Thank you.
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00:22:24
Speaker
Welcome to Kubernetes
Interview with Don Lucchini: Growth and DevOps Evolution
00:22:26
Speaker
Bites. We're live here in DevOps Days Boston. Please introduce yourself and our audience. Hi, I'm Don Lucchini. I'm one of the organizers of DevOps Days Boston. I've been organizing the event with a handful of other folks who we filter in and out every couple of years. I've been doing it for about six. It's honestly one of the most rewarding things that I've done in the Boston community because for me in 2017 was almost like a career springboard. It was a great way to get out into the community.
00:22:53
Speaker
to get recognized, to get your face out, to get sort of the thought leadership going, if you will. And what I've since realized is it's a really good way to get people into the community too. Like I'm happy that this year we have a whole bunch of new volunteers and new organizers that are new to our community. And this is a great way to get them to contribute too.
00:23:11
Speaker
Yeah, likewise. Well, speaking of career, what do you do besides in your day job, I guess I should say. Yeah, I wear a lot of hats at my day job. I work for a company called Abacus Insights. We're local to Boston. We're a health care tech company. OK. My title is Principal Software Engineer. OK. It means a lot of things. But I want to say I spend my time roughly split, I don't know, half and half, maybe 70, 30 between individual contributor work and architectural guidance for a new platform.
00:23:37
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. So Don, you said you have been doing the DevOps community for more than six years. What does DevOps mean to you? And what does this community, how does this community come together?
00:23:49
Speaker
No, I love this question because it's honestly the ultimate interview question. It's a great way to weed people out. A lot of people say, well, it's tools. A lot of people say, well, it's process. I think it means something very different to every company. It really is dictated, at least in a company by company basis, by what is the company looking for? There are some companies that say, we do DevOps, but I want an ops team. Is it DevOps?
00:24:12
Speaker
In my opinion, no, but to them it is. When I think of it, I'm thinking more about process changes than I am technology. The tools are things that enable you to make the process changes, but we are not a tool community.
00:24:27
Speaker
even though we have a lot of tools. I'm seeing... I thought that was the DevOps periodic table behind me. It's a seat map. But just the fact that it has so many little squares is telling enough. That would be well-placed, I would say. You've been doing this for three years. I guess, how has it changed? Have you seen this? Because a lot has happened in three years, let's be honest. You've been through big changes. I'd like your perspective there.
00:24:56
Speaker
Yeah, I actually joined the Boston DevOps community back in 2013. And in 2013, no one knew what the word DevOps meant, nobody. I think it's a better understood problem now where somebody can go bootstrapping DevOps organization and understand how to get there. But in 2013, no one knew that. What was also neat though is that we had no secrets. Everyone was willing to learn from everyone else. And because of that, we created for ourselves a culture of sharing.
00:25:24
Speaker
I remember very, very distinctly in 2013, we had a monthly meetup talk where 250 people packed into an auditorium to learn about how to use S3 to store files. Oh, wow. And there are no more little quick wins like that.
00:25:40
Speaker
I think prior to the that was when we were at our biggest that community that we kind of, you know, slid in terms of number of people for the monthly meetup that's attached to DevOps stays Boston. Prior to the pandemic, we had, you know, maybe 70 to 100 people every month. Post pandemic, we've got about 30 to 40 a month.
00:26:00
Speaker
What's interesting about that is the transition from going pre to post was people are working from home now and the value prop is no longer just stay two hours downtown for to go learn. It's come downtown after you've worked all day to learn. And no one really wants to do that unless they're either very close or very into learning.
00:26:19
Speaker
Yep. That's my dilemma. Like I live in Arlington. I was like, I really want to go to this meetup, but is it worth the 45 minute drive? Oh, it's worth it. You should come. So again, DevOps, right? Like give a good description about it. Like how does that change or evolve into platform engineering? I know we hear a lot of noise around platforms, platform teams, platform internet development platforms. How does that relate to DevOps?
00:26:46
Speaker
I think platform engineering, at least to me, is a particular brand of DevOps. It's one that's easier to package and sell. Because what we can do with platform engineering is we can say in a company with some organizational maturity already, we can turn them loose on a platform that allows them to go rapidly, to build and rapidly iterate a thing that's mostly correct.
00:27:05
Speaker
In a small organization like mine though, I'm actually not making a lot of tech changes. I'm making mostly process changes. And platform engineering isn't a process change so much as it's an entirely different tech stack with a lot of automation in front of it. So while I see it as a branch of it, I see them as more complimentary or more as a sort of two parallel things than at odds with each other like a lot of others do. Gotcha. And when you said what you do for work, you said principles of an engineer. I know that's not just writing code, but
00:27:33
Speaker
How internally right at work since you're not not from a vendor side, how does platform engineering work? Like, are you building your own platforms? Are you helping out? Do you have a platform team right now?
00:27:43
Speaker
We're actually very small. So we have probably 17, 18 engineers. We are not actively building out a platform team or platform engineering. Where we are, we are actually building a completely brand new product. It's hard, I think, to, I think it's a little bit putting the cart before the horse to build out platform engineering for a brand new product, because it feels very start-up-y again. And if you were a tiny start-up, you should not be doing platform engineering.
00:28:11
Speaker
That's kind of where we are. We do not have anything to iterate or I shouldn't say that we don't have something to iterate on in a microservice way yet that we should be deploying components and components and components. We need a small set of components. We need the monorepo. We need. That's what we need right now. We haven't gotten to that point yet. You don't have enough parts to choose a golden path or build that golden part. It is free.
00:28:31
Speaker
Exactly. Well, I wouldn't say that we don't have golden paths. It's that the golden paths are still very highly integrated. I can give it without leaking too much detail of how our product works. We have one large Terraform repo that's starting to break off into a couple just based on the way that the work is being done. We have one primary application repo that is still one primary application repo. I think there is a push now that we're integrating with a third party vendor.
00:28:57
Speaker
I was doing some of the work for us to split that off its own thing. And that's the first time we've done anything like that. And that was mere weeks ago. Maturity wise, we're just not there yet. So if we were at a point where we're saying we're creating new infrastructure components every week, then it would make sense for us to do a platform engineering initiative. But right now, not so much.
Platform Engineering and Product Scale
00:29:18
Speaker
That begs the question too, because I've heard platform merging engineering be categorized sort of a subcategory sort of to DevOps as also an evolution. Right. Um, so I'm curious now we're sort of showcasing that there's a scale to need for platform engineering crossing paths here. So, um, what's your take on, where do you have to get to, to, to maybe get the benefits of an IDP?
00:29:45
Speaker
That's a good question. I think that the scale that you need to get at is not so much a scale in terms of the size of the org is the scale the size of the product. Sure. Eventually you'll get to a point where it doesn't make sense to work on a single product and make sense to work on components and modules. And once you hit that stage.
00:30:00
Speaker
That I think is when you can benefit from this. There was the company that I worked at prior to the one that I'm at now was definitely at this point. And we were actively encouraged to go build modules. Do not deliver features on top of anything that already exists. Please keep everything small. Keep the unit of things the team. And that was a really nice way of rationalizing it because a team should own a small chunk of a product rather than the org owns this massive product.
00:30:26
Speaker
That makes sense. So you mentioned Terraform. You know, this is a Kubernetes base podcast. Do you use Kubernetes? I do. What's the rest of that sort of stack, if you could talk about it? Sure. So we're actually in our new stack. We're actually very heavily leaning into third party data platforms. So we're users of Databricks, users of Snowflake.
00:30:45
Speaker
One of the things that our customers are looking for is the ability to run across public cloud offerings because some of our customers, especially in healthcare space, they say, I don't want to do any kind of business with Amazon. Please do not deploy us in AWS. And what's nice about using Kubernetes as the control plane is that, yes, if I'm using very specific resources to a cloud provider, yes, then I have to make it support that.
00:31:09
Speaker
But a lot of the tooling that we do is very agnostic of that, and I won't say it translates perfectly, but it means that for the custom built Terraform stuff outside of Kubernetes, I need to get to the point where in AWS I have an EKS cluster, I need a network and all of that. Or in Azure, I need to get to the point where I have an EKS cluster, I have a network.
00:31:30
Speaker
Some users some security some storage some all of that and then once I'm there I can use I can reuse a lot of the automation that I've already got across clouds so it minimizes the amount of repeat work that I have to do. And that's one of the biggest reasons we're using it. I think the other reason is going back to the whole idea of where a smaller company with a small product.
00:31:50
Speaker
It doesn't make sense for us to have those modules yet. And because of that, we still want to do segmentation. The Kubernetes control plane allows us to do that, so we don't have to run duplicates of compute for every little piece of the stack. We can just sort of co-locate it all and not have to think about, well, here's the cluster for that, here's the cluster for that, here's the cluster for that.
00:32:10
Speaker
Okay. So, okay. Now I want to bring us back to the DevOps phase conference that we are at right now, right? Like DevOps, we know the principle is about continuously improving and doing things in a better way. When we were talking to Paul earlier, he brought out a few things that have changed over the years for the better. What are your takeaways from this conference, seeing how people have gone to sessions, interacted in open spaces, or spoken to vendors in that area?
Global DevOps Days and New Initiatives
00:32:36
Speaker
So what's really neat about DevOps Days and a lot of attendees, I mean, I'm sure you guys know, but a lot of attendees here don't know that DevOps Days is not a Boston thing. DevOps Days is a worldwide thing. I believe we have about 150 different events. It's massive. And we go to each other's events and we learn from each other. That manifested this year in what we called the Organizer Summit. And the Organizer Summit was where we got all, I won't say all of the events, but a good chunk of people who all organized DevOps Days events to talk about organizing DevOps Days events.
00:33:06
Speaker
And we got some interesting takeaways from that. Something that we're doing completely brand new this year is we're doing this thing called the 101 track. Because every year, and we've never dug into why they say we just know that it happens. We get a lot of students, we get a lot of product managers. I don't understand that one. Sometimes we've had HR people, sales people, people looking to break into tech sometimes. Sometimes they end up here. And we wanted to figure out, can we do something for them?
00:33:31
Speaker
I actually can't take credit for this idea. This was Kate Knottbar is the other co-organizer that I organized with who came up with this idea. And we had frankly no perspective on how this was going to work because no other DevOps days has done it. We've never done it. We got three workshop speakers and we
00:33:48
Speaker
couldn't promise them that anyone would even come. We didn't know what was going to happen. And as the logistics person, I actually do not get to listen to any of our talks. I have to run around. I lose like five pounds these two days because I'm running around so much. And any time that I went into the 101 talk hall, it was packed. People were sitting on the floor. And this was an unmitigated success from what I can tell. I'm really looking forward. Every year, we do feedback that we solicit from all of the attendees. And I'm really looking forward to what we hear back from them on that.
00:34:19
Speaker
What do you think is driving, I think, those 101 tracks being so successful? Is it that we're attracting those students and those PMs that are breaking into it? Or do you think that we're finally at sort of the maturity of this kind of ecosystem where people are like, oh, I guess I should start to learn this stuff? Or is it a little bold?
00:34:41
Speaker
I mean, I think there are a number of factors there. One is that, yes, we do have teachable people here. I think we're all teachable in some regard, but otherwise we wouldn't be coming to conferences. But we did do some directed outreach to people that we wanted to let know we were going to have this kind of parallel event going on.
00:34:57
Speaker
And I think that's what drove a lot of the attendance there. That said, we never really understood why we had so many people who would benefit from that track anyway. And I'm guessing, I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing some of that attendance to that track was organic. They were people who would have came any other way.
00:35:13
Speaker
I was actually talking to a couple of folks last night and I did not quite get a good understanding of how they found us. My understanding is they googled DevOps conferences and found the next one somewhere around them. I was talking to someone, I forget her name, she came from Philadelphia because this was the next one and she wanted to get into the space. That's the kind of sort of serendipitous discovery that like if we can do something for that, that's really cool.
00:35:42
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. One thing I wanted to ask too is sort of about the open spaces. One thing we've heard consistently with talking with attendees is that this is a big differentiator for this type of conference. It's also something they don't necessarily experience unless they come to a conference like this. How do you think those are really affecting how people learn or what they get out of this type of conference?
00:36:11
Speaker
I think it's a participatory learning. Everybody learns differently. Some people benefit in a classroom setting, some people benefit by doing, some people benefit by talking. Talking through something until they better understand a situation around them. This year we had all three, which was really neat. We had talks, we had workshops, and we had open spaces.
00:36:30
Speaker
I'm one of those people who best benefits by doing followed by talking something through and I think that's the benefit that people are getting. Another thing that I really love about open spaces is you might get exposed to something that you did not intend to get exposed to. Sometimes the discussions that you have in those you might end up referring to years down the road.
00:36:49
Speaker
I think one of the ones that I referred to for a couple of years, and this goes back to DevOps was not a known quantity in 2013, 2014. I was at ChefConf, I believe it was 2014, and Docker was the new thing and no one really understood Docker yet. Everyone was like, is it lightweight PMs? What is this? And what was interesting about that is we had a conversation at ChefConf about do we provision Docker containers using Chef?
00:37:16
Speaker
I think we know not to do that now, but that was not so clear back then. And in having that conversation, I unwittingly prepped myself for when people said to me at work, hey, can we just run the chef code in a Docker container and be in Docker? And it really armed me to go have that conversation. But that was years later, and I did not know at the time I was going to get that out of that open space.
00:37:39
Speaker
Sometimes you'll pick up something like that, sometimes you'll pick up a tool, sometimes you'll pick up a process. Actually, I would say one of the most successful process changes I ever made in an organization, I got the idea out of an open space. Unfortunately, I do not remember what the open space was about, but someone gave me the idea for doing office hours. So I want all of the senior people, the leadership on a team, basically show up in a box,
00:38:04
Speaker
one hour a week, let people come to you, let people ask questions without fear of reprisal or looking silly in a Slack channel or something like that. And this person was sort of saying, this is a really great thing to do. And I had no context for the fact that it was going to be such an unmitigated success in my org until I tried it. And I was like, this is great. Now I'm doing talks on it. That's awesome. So I know you were recording some of the schedule presentations, but are the open spaces also recorded? And will you be posting those?
00:38:33
Speaker
So the open spaces are not recorded and that's fully on purpose. We want those to be safe spaces for people. People can make mistakes on them. People can say, I don't know something because like I'm one of the first people who will tell you, I don't know, educate me. I'm an idiot. Not everybody is like that. A lot of people don't want to say, I don't know the answer. And we want that to be a place where you can say, I don't know, can you educate me and have it stay there?
00:38:59
Speaker
One of the most interesting ones, this is not a thing that we ran here, but a number of other DevOps Days events do it. It's called TalkPay. And the whole idea of TalkPay is we get all of our salaries on a board and we talk about how much am I worth. If that were recorded, everybody would probably get fired. Yeah, that's a great idea. I think I would appreciate that. Just a board, different titles, this is what everybody's getting paid. I know you can find that info somewhere on Glassdoor or something like that.
00:39:27
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, on Glassdoor, it's anonymous and essentially in an open space. It's also anonymous. I mean, I have, I have a badge, but somebody is going to remember, oh yeah, that person makes $500,000 and not going to remember who it was unless they like took the time to look at, like internalize the name on the name tag.
00:39:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's a fair point. You mentioned before that, you know, 2013 people didn't know what Docker
Engagement and Networking for Newcomers
00:39:49
Speaker
really was. And now this is 10 years later. 10 years later, what would be the kind of your suggestion if you are new to this? Is open space is a great way to start. Is it online resources? Is it like where would you kind of send someone to go learn from their home, I guess, if they're trying to get into this kind of thing, if it's apart from coming to a conference like this?
00:40:11
Speaker
I'm glad you asked that because I'm actually doing that with a number of people here this year. Some of the volunteers are my personal friends who are trying to get into this space and or get hired. And what I suggested to them is you need to network. You need to have these kinds of impromptu conversations. You need to build yourself into the community. We had a member of our community named Jason present on stage in a lightning talk today about how he's new to the community. He's found it very welcoming. He's finding a ton of resources and a ton of help in it.
00:40:39
Speaker
And we wanted to give him the platform to do that. And that's what community is about. We, at the end of the day, are a local conference that can enable that. And we want him to succeed. And now he has the resume experience to say, I presented at DevOps days and he's only been in tech for nine months. That's what community can do for you. And that's why we want to enable that.
00:40:57
Speaker
That's actually something similar that we do in how we schedule talks here at DevOps Days, at least in Boston. I'm not speaking to all of the events, but we run completely blind talk selection. So when you submit a talk to DevOps Days Boston, you were sort of chosen and ranked purely on your technical merit of the talk. And then once we built the schedule, then we reveal the names. Sometimes it's like, oops, we scheduled the same person three times, and we have to adjust things.
00:41:24
Speaker
More often than not, it means things are bubbling to the top purely on the technical merit and not because of any particular, I know that that person's a name. That is not necessarily equitable because it means that you have the most senior people presenting every single time. So we ask some more pointed questions in the intake form like, are you local? Are you underrepresented in DevOps? Are you a couple of things like that? And we will adjust ratings based on that as well.
00:41:52
Speaker
So it's not just how good is the talk. It's kind of a blend of a couple of different metrics. But the moral of the story is that the names only come out at the very end. Great. Well, I think that's pretty much the time we had today. And I wanted to, again, thank you for coming on the show, Don. And again, being an organizer, thank you again for this event and all the team and everything you do for this. It's been a great experience so far.
00:42:18
Speaker
Yeah. And likewise, thank you guys for the time and thank you for attending and thank you for the hallway track. I know it's a literal hallway track, so this is wonderful. Great. Take care. Take care. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Kubernetes Bites podcast.