Austin DevOps Events Summary – Culture is Important

Last week some of our team attended several DevOps Austin related events. We had a great time learning and interacting with other technologists attending both  PuppetCamp Austin and DevOps Days Austin.

This edition of the annual DevOps Days event in Austin (which also takes place in other cities each year) was declared the biggest. There were great discussions, Ignite talks, and Open Space sessions as well. And while there are always many conversations around technology, there was a noticeable focus on culture.

Many of the talks on both days had a strong cultural component. On the second day, the organizers even mentioned feedback from some attendees to move past the culture stuff and on to tech talks. But it was obvious from the sessions that a large number of people felt the cultural conversation was important. Those of you in the Agile community who haven’t looked closely at Development Operations will be recognized these are similar conversations to those occurring about Agile in general.

Some notable takeaways:

• Patrick Debois on The future of DevOps – slides/video
• DevOps State of the Union by John Willis
• John Heintz tweeted that DevOps is 90% attitude (culture, meme) and 10% technology
• Pete Cheslock had a talk on DevOps in Your Job Title Is Doing You Harm
• Jeff Hackert had a talk on Exploiting Conway’s Law for Underpants and Profit
• Gene Kim, one of the co-authors of The Phoenix Project, spoke on How Do We Better Sell DevOps
• Speaking of The Phoenix Project, it was referenced in many talks and obviously making an impact with many. It is a novel about Dev Ops and Business and highly recommended.
• Sharing a Culture of Automation – Instant Infrastrucutre in Developing Nations by Chris McClimans

There were too many great talks to highlight them all here. You can see all the recorded talks on Vimeo. You should also look back through tweets to see what people were saying during the conference.

If you haven’t attended one of these events, you should definitely try to attend at least one they put on each year.