Kansas City 2016 in review

by Aaron Blythe - 21 March, 2017

On October 20th and 21st, 2016, 208 software practioners met in a packed house in Kansas City Missouri at Musical Theater Heritage to discuss DevOps at DevOpsDays KC.

You can check out a recap here:

The conference was a mixture of presentations and open spaces. Speakers came from both coasts and included viewpoints ranging from a high school student to a PhD, from seasoned executives to software and system engineers, from first time presenters to presenters with over 60 conferences speaking slots. Open spaces were held in the afternoon. This is where the conference takes a turn from organized formal content to informal self-organizing content. Attendees suggested topics and voted throughout the day. They then voted with their feet throughout the afternoon by moving from the 5 simultaneous discussions.

The videos and slides of all talks are linked on our program.

Kudos were given across the board in the attendee survey here are some:

  • The organization and speakers were great. The Open Spaces was easily the best open spaces I have been part of and extremely valuable.
  • I wasn’t sure I’d like the idea of Open Spaces but it went off without a hitch. It was great to get insight from others with exactly the same problems (and some not even close).
  • Very well organized. Allowed KC companies to promote their capabilities in a very organized manner.
  • That the company I work for does some things better than other companies (but also some things worse).

Thank you to everyone involved in this experience! See you on Slack and at the local devops meetup!

2016 Kansas City Organizers:



Kansas City 2016 organizers


(left to right):
Bert Weidt, CJ Obermaier, Chris Stein (back), Dan Barker, Tom Martin, Chase Pettet, Ryan McNair (back), Aaron Blythe
organizers {{ $e.city }} {{ $e.year }}