Show notes
Bridget and Matty record live in front of an audience at devopsdays Minneapolis 2019 with three panelists: Liz Fong-Jones, a developer advocate at Honeycomb who gave the opening keynote, Alice Goldfuss, an infrastructure engineer at GitHub who gave the closing keynote, and RJ Williams, a devopsdays Raleigh co-organizer and senior marketing specialist at ASBE, a training and coaching company. It is the first Minneapolis for all three. Matty says it's the sixth Minneapolis event Matty has attended, and that devopsdays Chicago always follows right after, so Matty brings something back from each one to borrow.
Keynotes in a Sentence
Liz's talk was about focusing on people, processes and culture to run more reliable systems, since "you can't really just buy an alphabet soup of tools." Alice's talk was four and a half years of pain running containers in production, and its theme is that containers are just a tool. You shouldn't deploy them because someone talked you into it in the hallway track, so assess whether they fix your problem.
Liz adds that doing it correctly takes serious investment, so why not pay someone else to run it. Alice says the startup habit used to be building things to save money, and encourages people to look at what their business does to generate revenue and whether what they're building is part of that core value. Liz connects it to Heidi Waterhouse's Ignite talk the night before, about which thing is the goose that lays the eggs, and Matty says to find out how your company makes money: "If you don't, go find out. I'll wait."
You Can't Buy DevOps
RJ's takeaways from the open spaces were that legacy and complexity exist everywhere, and that everyone's DevOps is different, with no need for Jenkins or any particular tool to know you're doing it. Liz says automation and tools help with things you already know how to do, but what you don't know how to do or what your culture doesn't represent has to be worked out first. Alice says it needs driving home because people think buying Docker gets them DevOps, and "DevOps is a culture. It is not tools." Matty's version: "you can't buy DevOps, but I sure as hell can sell you some."
Liz says you can't hope to succeed until you know what you're optimizing for, which is why the talk stressed service level indicators and measuring the customer's experience, and starting somewhere instead of targeting all the nines. RJ says clients often arrive after an executive announces "we're DevOps now," and ASBE coaches them through it while training. Most of ASBE's DevOps audience skews toward developers, and RJ asks whether the infrastructure side is agile too, since if not, "you're not doing DevOps."
Humans in the Loop
Liz says automation exists to empower people to do more, and that you won't get better decisions by taking humans out of the loop. RJ says talks at the event kept returning to the human side of automation. Matty says automation should get the human everything they need for the judgment call about whether a spike meant anything, and jokes that Skynet will eventually run PagerDuty. Bridget says this is the golden era of AI washing, and Alice's version: "It's AI when you're fundraising. It's ML when you're hiring engineers. And it's an if-else statement when you're actually making it." Liz points to Jessica Kerr's talk debunking the idea that smarter automation requires stupider humans.
Bridget also recommends Nivea Henry's talk on how the beliefs of a system's creators, conscious or not, end up in its algorithms, with the Babbage line "if we put the wrong figures in, do the right answers come out?" Liz adds that the exposure of people's information matters too, citing a large retailer that mailed pregnancy congratulations to people's houses.
What Minneapolis Does Well
RJ would steal the closed captioning, and praises the thoughtfulness and inclusion behind it. Liz says that in 2019 they only speak at events that have live or after-the-fact captioning, and that in 2020 they'll require live captioning for the room: "you wouldn't have a conference without a code of conduct. Why are you having conferences that are not accessible?" Bridget says participants who never thought captions were for them later say they caught something they missed, and Alice, who has a history of hearing problems, says the captions help people whose need isn't visible.
Bridget describes the room for nursing mothers, which costs no extra budget: organizers who won't be in their hotel rooms between about 7 AM and 10 PM have the room cleaned and leave a key card at the info desk. A nursing mother used Bridget's room that day.
Alice says the AV, lighting and stage make Minneapolis stand out, compared with Portland's first year, when the organizers borrowed a screen from a local BSides group. Bridget credits Joe, an organizer who works for PSAV, and gives the recipe: time travel to the '90s and date the cute audiovisual tech. Liz says sponsors pay for that magic, and Minneapolis has worked hard to support them. Alice likes that the sponsor hall sits between the door and the food, so attendees have to go through "the sponsor gauntlet," which Alice loves as a sponsor. RJ chose this event by seeing how many sponsors it had. Bridget notes it depends on the venue, and that local companies may send 20 people instead of 4 to the expensive coastal conference. Matty adds that the Minneapolis meetup will show 250 RSVPs on meetup.com and 245 people will show up.
One Thing for Your Own Event
Matty says the devopsdays Chicago badges say participant, not attendee, and this year none will say speaker or sponsor. Organizers may get a different color for identifying staff, and their badges will say participant too. Matty reminds everyone that for most attendees this may be the one event they attend all year. Liz wants a more explicit New York call for papers process and a concrete guide to facilitating open spaces so newcomers raise a hand. RJ says the inclusion bar has been raised and is taking notes back to the Raleigh organizers.
Alice, as MC, normalizes inclusive behavior, and each year locates the gender-neutral bathroom at a shared conference center and announces it every day. Bridget says Minneapolis signs say "stalls and urinals" and "stalls only" instead of labeling by people, which gives information instead of assumptions, like documentation that doesn't make untoward assumptions about its end user. Bridget adds that Minneapolis participants often work in large, brownfield enterprises with a lot of legacy, and are pragmatic about building on what exists.
Closing Thoughts
Alice says Bridget got their room extended when a flight was delayed three hours, and the venue televisions showed flight status for anyone waiting, small touches that make a speaker feel welcome. RJ says people were open about their transformations, which is the on-the-ground view that training clients don't usually share. Liz says that talking at the speaker dinner with Serena, who spoke about logging pipelines for security, turned up that they were fighting the same Apache Kafka problems, even though Serena is outside the startup bubble. The show ends with Matty's sign-off: "there's always DevOps in the banana stand."
Upcoming events mentioned: devopsdays Chicago, August 27th and 28th; devopsdays Portland, September 10th through 12th, with a hackathon on the first day; devopsdays Raleigh, October 1st and 2nd; and devopsdays New York in early 2020.
Bridget and Matty chat with guests Liz Fong-Jones, Alice Goldfuss, and RJ Williams, in front of a live studio audience at devopsdays Minneapolis 2019.
Liz Fong-Jones is a new organizer of devopsdays New York City. Alice Goldfuss is the MC for devopsdays Portland. RJ Williams is an organizer of devopsdays Raleigh.
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