DevOpsDays Austin 2019 Highlights

We held our eighth DevOpsDays Austin last month! DevOpsDays Austin 2019 was held at the UT Austin stadium for two days full of talks, openspaces, and so on. All the videos of the sessions are up on YouTube in the DevOps Austin channel that holds other years’ videos as well.

Here’s my top 10 countdown list of great things about this year’s DevOpsDays Austin!

Platinum Sponsor Suite

10. We brought the sponsor room back, and added platinum suites in the stadium luxury boxes so sponsors that wanted to hold sessions could do so. There were very well attended sessions in these suites!

9. We had two content tracks and a new “Conversations” talk format – a short 20 minute talk followed by a linked openspace for interactive demos and discussions and command line stuff that doesn’t do well in a talk session. We only had space for a handful of them but they were very highly rated and we’re considering shifting significantly towards them next year.

8. We made the happy hour more modest and onsite, but with DevOps Trivia from Patrick Debois!  We had a bunch of teams compete and it was a wild and woolly time. We even used Patrick’s zender.tv online trivia thing to let people outside the venue compete.

The remnants of the cupcakes

7. Our fine venue, food, and drink team and vendors… We ripped into some mini cupcakes at snack time!!!

6. The openspaces.  I actually got to attend some this year instead of just running around working.  And they were all brilliant.

5. Our organizers! We bestowed the title of MVP organizer on two organizers this year – Daria Ilic for her great job with communication and Dan Zentgraf for doing a yeoman job with the sponsors.

Special thanks to all the DevOpsDays Austin 2019 organizers: James Wickett (Speakers), Peco Karayanev (Speakers), Karthik Gaekwad (Swag), Daria Ilic (Marketing, Volunteers), Dan Zentgraf (Sponsors), Tom Hall (Sponsors), Boyd Hemphill (Volunteers), Scott Baldwin (Web site), Lee Thompson (AV), Carl Perry (AV), Ian Richardson (Attendees), Chris Casey (Signage and Slides), Richard Boyd (Venue, Food, Happy Hour), Asif Ahmad (Venue, Food, Happy Hour), Bailey Moore (Venue, Food, Happy Hour), and thanks to Laura from ConferenceOps for doing all our finances.

4. I let the other organizers talk me into buying the Jumbotron!  I am naturally thrifty so had resisted given the significant price tag in previous years, but we had a glut of sponsors and everyone really wanted it so I finally gave in. Karthik even changed his Slack name to JUMBOTRON to petition for it. It remains so until this very day. You  have to respect the dedication. So behold – the DevOpsDays Austin Jumbotron! (Yes, that’s real, not Photoshopped.)

3. Check out our cool organizer swag I got each organizer this year as a thank you gift – custom Vans with the DevOpsDays Austin mascot on them!  (They’re only $80, if a little work intensive to design on their site, feel free and steal the idea!) People always love our DevOpsDays Austin shirts so I wanted to give the organizers a really distinctive way to show their pride in the event.

2. A very special thank you to DevOpsDays Austin from Mandy Whaley and the Cisco DevNet crew, who have been sponsors and speakers and attendees for many years.  I wasn’t expecting this – they actually used their sponsor shout-out time to present us onstage with a heartfelt card that they read to the audience.

We appreciate everything that Mandy and the team bring to the event and the card was super touching.

1. What could be better than that, though, you ask? How can such a kind shout-out be number 2 on the list?

Well, we had a little problem, and that problem was a spare $25,000 from letting in the gold sponsors above our initial sponsor room cap because they really, really wanted in and we felt bad for them. DevOpsDays Austin (like all DoDs) is a non-profit, so while we keep a war chest to pay for next year’s venue and stuff, the rest has to go. Previous years we did some modest donations to the Capitol Area Food Bank; last year we actually had enough spare money so that we let each organizer do a $1000 donation to a charity of their choice. But this was quite a larger chunk, so what to do?

Some of the organizers brought up a great opportunity they knew about and had given to themselves. Here in Austin there’s a really unique program going on, the Community First! Village – a planned community that provides affordable, permanent housing and a supportive community for men and women coming out of chronic homelessness.

Community First! Village Micro-Home

And it turns out $25,000 is how much is needed to build a micro-home in their next phase of expansion, to house a formerly homeless person in their community. These are little 180-200 square foot homes with electricity but no plumbing that are the foundation of their village. The whole organizer team got super excited about this opportunity.

So that’s what we did – we sponsored one of these homes to be built. We’re pleased to have the ability to help Austin in a permanent way out of the conference!

I’m going to do a separate blog post on this because it’s an awesome program that many companies in Austin have been getting behind, and it’s remarkably successful in helping our large homeless population. But thanks so much to all the sponsors and attendees that made this possible.

DoD Austin Organizer (and Family) Tour of the Community First! Village

We had a great time at DevOpsDays Austin this year and hope many of you did too. Next, we’ll publish a full retrospective that we hope some of you and other DevOpsDays organizers will find interesting.