DevOpsDays Baltimore

DevOpsDays Baltimore 2017

Where- Baltimore MD When 07 - 08 March 2017
Official Site - https://www.devopsdays.org/events/2017-baltimore/welcome/
Schedule - http://devopsdaysbaltimore2017.busyconf.com/schedule
YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxpCqO1jg-xyTB8uZo049Bw

Summary

Conference about Devops

Take Aways From Keynotes

Look at technical problems as business problems:

• 404 on Amazon means no sales
• 404 on Wall Street Journal means no Ad Revenue

Don't cling to mistakes because you spent too much time on them

Blameless != Lack of Accountability

Emergent Work: tickets that are added after a project starts because we forgot to think of something (just happy to have a "word" for something that happens on every project

Difference Between Logging and Monitoring

Logging:

• Actionable
• Concise
• Useful

Monitoring:

• All Inclusive
• Business First
• Correlatable

Takeaways from Ignite Talks

The importance of taking time off and unplugging given by a jewish man was an interesting take as someone who is forced because of his religion to take a daily break from the internet every week. The interesting thing I took from his talk, is that when you log off for a day to de-stress, it's meaningless when you log back in and have 100's of emails and social media notifications to go through. When you unplug you also need to have ways to return back to the plugged in world with a plan to not overwhelm yourself. (Like when you don't work for 2 days because you are at a conference)

Another ignite talk spent a lot of time exploring the benefits and practices of postmortems. This is something we don't really practice in our team, and because of the nature of our project, I'm not sure where they would fit in our process. It seems like something we should explore though as the project begins to get more use.

Talks

Don't Mind the Gap: How to DevOps in an Airgapped world Galen Emery - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD2DDLEW0o0&start=7000

Open Spaces

Chad attended a few really good open spaces throughout the conference. These were much more freeform and participation was encouraged. The first day the best was how to deal with tech fatigue. We spoke about struggling to keep up to date with emerging technologies. Should we get paid to learn new technologies, or should that be done on our own time. If so, how do we find time when we also have lives to live. It was great to hear other peoples perspectives on this, because it is a problem I think all developers face.

Another great open space was about how to get devops into government spaces where you have so many barriers, from the struggles of moving code, to government personnel that aren't known to be willing to change. A solution proposed was to ensure that these things are included in the requirement documents, and the contracts so that everyone is on board from inception. Otherwise, you face a lot of hurdles. Particularly in places where the government employees the testers and integrators and the contractor is providing the developers and operations. We heard stories of testers that refused to believe testing could be automated. Very good talk, probably one of the most interactive of the conference. Everyone had horror stories.

Also attended an open space on "how to be the boss" which I assumed would be a good one to hear how to move up the ranks in a company. I heard a lot of great quotes about this like "when you become the boss, don't think of it as a promotion, think of it as a career change". This is a really good thing to keep in the back of your mind, when you become the boss you have to throw away the macbook and code and trade it in for an ipad and meetings. Hearing peoples experiences of trying to weave business backgrounds into devops and the other way around were also enlightening.