DevOpsDays 2011 - Mountain View Announcement

13 April, 2011

Announcing the 2011 DevOps Days - Mt. View

What started in Ghent in 2009 and has travelled the world from Sydney to Sao Paulo to Boston is now coming BACK to Mountain View! That’s right, following on the heels of an awesome 2-day event in Boston DevOps Days is rolling into town to cap off the Velocity Conference.

This will be the seventh official DevOps Days event and it’s sure to be a grand one.

Save the date

The event will take place June 17th and 18th. That’s a Friday and Saturday. If you’re going to be in town for Velocity (or you want to come out specifically for DevOps Days) you don’t want to miss this.

Especially if you’re going to Velocity, the DevOps Days format is a great way to interact with people that you might not have had otherwise. If you’ve never been, think of it as the Hallway track on steroids. There’s no reason NOT to stay the extra two days and come experience something that could literally change your professional life.

The format

No two DevOps Days are alike. They’re like Pokemonm, ‘gotta attend em all!’.

Special care is taken to tailor the event format as a whole to fit the particulars of, not only the location and the audience, but also to the state of DevOps at the time.

The 2011 Mountain View event is no exception. Where as last year was a 1 day event, we’re going for two days this year. Because of the days of the week involved, we’re mixing things up a bit (subject to a bit of change):

  • Friday June 17

    This will be similar to the event last year in that we plan on having panel discussions. We’re also adding a few tricks we picked up from past events, including Boston this year:

    • Ignite talks
    • Openspace (proposal period)

    Ignite talks are a rockin’ good time. You get 5 minutes and 20 slides to talk about a topic. Oh, did we mention your slides auto-advance?

    Open spaces are a great way to tailor the conference to what you want to hear about. Because of the sheer number of people that we expect, we’re going to change things up a bit from previous open spaces. Friday will be proposal day while Saturday….

  • Saturday June 18

    This will be the day that for the actual open spaces. As with Friday, we’re also bringing something along from Boston - Demo Rounds!

    Demo rounds were something that happened quite by accident and organically in Boston. Think of it as an Ignite presentation merged with openspace and a side of The Gong Show/Survivor. Got a cool project, you’re working on? Give a demo. If the group likes it and wants you to keep going, you can. The group gets tired? Yield the floor to the next person.

Lessons Learned

There are two reasons for doing two days in Mountain View this year. The first is that two days is becoming the official DevOps Days format. There’s simply too much wonderful information to cover that can fit in one day.

The second reason, and one that we think is important enough that we are carrying over into Saturday, is based on experiences last year in Mountain View. Because we’re coming off of Velocity, the crowd is simply much larger. We want to fit in as much as possible and keep with some of the basic formats that we’ve used elsewhere - for instance the open spaces (which are worth the price of admission alone). We simply cannot fit that into one day.

Additionally, again because of the expected crowd size, we’re taking special pains to deal with some of the problems from last year. With such a large crowd, it was difficult for everyone to get a chance to interact with the speakers. We’re working hard to factor in interaction into all the discussions.

Be there or be square

You don’t want to miss this. You’ll meet some amazing people, learn lots of cool new stuff but also help shape the future of devops. One theme we’re really focusing on hard this year is “Moving the conversation forward”. That doesn’t mean we won’t have discussions around “the basics” but we’re ready to take it to the next level.

You have a chance to be a part of that discussion and help shape the face of something that is taking the information technology and business world by storm.

Please join us.