I just came back from the DevOpsDays 2013 in Berlin earlier this week, and wanted to share my impressions.
This was a very nice conference organized by @IngmarKrusch and @vdandre and I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate the guys on their full success and thank them, and all members of the organizers team (especially Ralph and Ravi) for their efforts.
So, what did I like about the conference. First and most the crowd. Very nerdy people there, a lot of experienced devops, interesting opinions. Some talks were really great. I especially liked DevTools team at Etsy by Daniel Schauenberg and How the QA team got Prezi ready for DevOps by Peter Neumark.
I also have held an ignite talk on DevOps@Runtime and I did really enjoy it (You can check out the video here, under Ignites Part 1). I must say, I really love the format, both as speaker and as listener. As speaker it forces you to concentrate on one message and deliver the message. This is a great concentration exercise. As listener it gives you a lot of knowledge at amazing speed, and in case the talk wasn’t that great, it’s over fast. I would love to see more of this at next bed-con, which I’m planing to attend next spring.
The good thing about the talks was, that there were almost no tools pitching, but culture things. Talking about DevOps Culture is really important to explain DevOps to people outside of the movement and I enjoyed it. Even some of the talks repeated the same principles (Trust, DevOps as Role, not Position, etc), they did it from different perspectives. As for my talk, I am planing to write a two-three blog posts, with the content of the talk.
I also would like to drop a word about the sponsors. Zeroturnaround guys where great. Very helpful, very knowing. Helped me with my JRebel installation. The new product LiveRebel is definitely worth looking deeper into it. However, I am not sure whether the licensing model will work well for us, with a lot of small tomcat instances. Overall the sponsors where not over represented, and without sponsors such a conference wouldn’t take place.
I also had a chance to do Open Space about MoSKito and share some insights with users and potential users. Testing support for Scala is on the ToDo list now.
So… Had fun, had useful and insightful conversations, see everyone next year!
Leon
