John Willis and I sat down for this five-year reunion video series, and he got me to admit something I had not shared much before: I was scared to put on the first DevOpsDays. I had never organized a conference on a subject that the attendees – and partly I myself – did not fully understand yet. Chris Read pointed me to Puppet and configuration management. Matt Rickenberg was doing cloud stuff I had never touched. My comfort zone was really the agile side, having worked closely with agile development teams.
What surprised me was the reaction afterwards. During the conference itself, I was running around making sure everyone was happy, worrying about sandwiches and logistics. I barely attended the sessions. It was not until a month later, when the traction on Twitter kept building and people like Stephen Nelson-Smith wrote influential blog posts about it, that I realized something had actually happened. I kept being amazed that people were still raving about it.
John told the story of how I apparently pulled him aside on the second day and asked if he would consider doing something similar in the US. I honestly cannot remember doing that. But it led to DevOpsDays being brought across the ocean – first at a hotel alongside Velocity Conference, with Jesse Robbins’ blessing. The decision to decentralize DevOpsDays, to not concentrate the attention and money, to require community groups before starting local events – those were deliberate choices that I believe contributed to the movement’s success.
Looking forward, I saw the industry side of devops becoming more about deal-making and less about practitioners, similar to what happened with agile conferences. The interesting frontier was taking devops thinking beyond tech – to networking, databases, security, and eventually to creative and marketing people. Whether we would still call that devops, I did not know. But we would be building on the same foundation.
Watch on YouTube – available on the jedi4ever channel
This summary was generated using AI based on the auto-generated transcript.