DevOpsDays is a worldwide series of technical conferences covering topics of software development, IT infrastructure operations, and the intersection between them. Topics often include automation, testing, security, and organizational culture.
One of their events was hosted in downtown Seattle, WA on April 26 - April 27, 2017 and I had an opportunity to be an attendee and watch the sessions there. There were also a LOT of vendors and it was quite interesting to speak to so many different companies and learn about their reasons of being at the event and what their company goals are. I’ve also made some great connections.
If you didn’t make at least one connection at a conference, then you may be doing something wrong. Be sure to bring business cards to make it easy to exchange your information, as writing it down makes it hard to keep track of. Also, smile a little bit more than usual because it sends an “open and friendly” invitation for people to talk to you, or vice versa. It never hurts to try a little bit right? There are absolutely no disadvantages unless you are trying to prevent smile lines on your face. ;-)
On a side note, DevOpsDays also hosts 100% online events to give an opportunity for people who are too busy to make it to the nearest event, or unable to travel to make it to the event.
At this event in Seattle, they were all very high quality talented speakers. As a speaker myself, I tend to analyze every move the person is making and how exactly they present each slide. I also pay attention to the way they transition through each slide, which makes my brain work extra hard trying to watch a session. On top of that I tweet like crazy about the conference I'm at!
In this particular session, I found it amazing that he mentioned "2017: ChatOps" as ChatOps is becoming a HUGE key term to know. What exactly is ChatOps? Without googling (trust me, this is harder for me than it is for you), I'd say it is "The use of a collaboration tool for managing backend DevOps and other developer processes to automate and simplify business or organization workflow". That's exactly how I see it as I am a Developer Evangelist for a collaboration tool called Cisco Spark. It allows you to chat, make rooms with subrooms, VoIP, video calling (especially with a group), and you can install apps from the Spark Depot to add integrations to your Cisco Spark platform. It is a very secure collaboration tool as we store data at Cisco. One of the things that made me really love Cisco Spark is the very clear API documentation. There's many examples and Learning Labs you can go through to get hands-on experience working with it. We make it very easy for you. <3 ChatOps!
I am hoping to return to next years event. Be sure to check out the list of DevOpsDays closest to you (or the online event) and attend at least one! Message (and follow) me on Twitter and let me know how it went. :-)