DevOps Days Boston 2016 - Vibrant!

If I had to describe DevOpsDays Boston with a single word, I would say: Vibrant!

On August 25th (Thursday) and 26th (Friday) I attended to DevOpsDays in Boston.

The conference was located in the Boston Park Plaza, a Hotel that provided a nice infrastructure to receive almost 1000 people (speakers, sponsors, volunteers, attendees, etc) during the event.

The DevOpsDays Call for Papers (CFP) is a process that deserves mention. This CFP process is anonymous, so the criteria used for selection is solely based on the submitted session abstract. The conference sold out all their tickets one week prior the event.

You could easily identify people from different DevOps roles (50% devs and 50% ops). There were also many volunteers like Diogenes Rettori, Myles, David, Laura and Peter, and many others that I just want to thank! There were also many sponsoring companies like Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Atlassian, Chef, Pivotal, etc.

The provided Booklet and t-shirt were clear references to the Boston Tea Party; but this time destroying Egos, Blames and Silos.

I want to compliment the conference organizers. They did something unique: Besides the technical content, they included several sessions with “humanised” content covering “How to write so people can understand”, “How to take care of human resources”, “Speaking for Non-Speakers”, “Salary negotiation”, etc. Many of them covered the “mental health” of DevOps professionals. There were also open-spaces where people proposed, voted and discussed topics in groups.

My session was a 3 hours Kubernetes Hands-on lab with 121 people. (50/50 of Dev and Ops). All of them were already using Docker containers and were very interested in Kubernetes. There were no power connectors in the room, so many people couldn’t stay until the end. Fortunately they can run the lab at their home with CDK: http://bit.ly/kubernetes-lab

I met a lot of new people and an amazing community. If you have a chance to go to a DevOpsDays, my advice is: GO! You will very likely find a DevOpsDays event close to you. Check out the events page: https://www.devopsdays.org/