Hello Austin area tech professionals, and happy holidays. We weren’t able to have DevOpsDays Austin in 2020 due to the pandemic, though we did manage to get our money back from our venue and refund all the attendees and sponsors fully. But what’s going on with DevOpsDays Austin now?
OK, the bad news up front – we don’t believe we will be having DevOpsDays Austin in 2021. Given the current projections of the pandemic, vaccine distribution, remaining unanswered questions about how long social distancing measures will be required (through the summer at least, longer depending on how many anti-vaxxers are literally infecting our society) and the 6 month lead time required to book venues and plan and execute a show like DoD Austin, we are not going to have our usual event this year, instead planning to come roaring back with a big, fun 10th anniversary DoD Austin in our usual May time slot in 2022.
We don’t want DoD Austin to be the “first one out of the gate” to test large events. The organizers (who are also involved with various smaller events and user groups) will be staying on top of things to have smaller gatherings later into 2021 to gauge risks, response, and so on.
But, there are two pieces of good news.
The first is that since Houston, Dallas, and Austin are all in the same boat, in March of 2021 there will be instead a DevOpsDays Texas virtual conference! Some of the organizers from those three cities are banding together to try this out, with Discord-based openspaces and all kinds of innovation, based on how the team with Matt and Sasha and folks put on DevOpsDays Chicago virtually this year. Ticket sales and CFP are open, so if you are hankering for some Texas style tech, that’s your hot ticket in 2021!
The second is that DevOpsDays Austin is donating $10,000 to the Central Texas Food Bank to help fill the dramatic need the pandemic has inflicted upon our community’s families.
A little story time on this one. We hadn’t thought about doing anything at all this year in terms of DevOpsDays Austin – we are still a little touchy after having to bring lawyers into play to get our venue money back when we couldn’t have the event due to COVID, and we ran a real risk of getting completely busted out this year. So in our minds we’re just sitting hard on our nest egg waiting for winter to lift, and with our (and everyone’s) next event more than a year away to be honest DoD isn’t the top of our list of things to even think about in a given week.
But one of our DoDA organizers, Boyd Hemphill, also runs the Austin DevOps meetup, and their meetup joined our CloudAustin meetup this year for our annual “12 Clouds of Christmas” lightning talk event (also being held virtually for the first time ever). During the announcements he made an impassioned plea for people in general to help out their local communities by donating with their time, treasure, and talent; even in the relatively affluent Austin suburb of Pflugerville they are distributing food to hundreds of families a week now through his church and network of local charities because the need is so high right now.
Over the next couple days, Boyd’s words continued to sear my conscience in an attempt to spur me into action. I finally resolved that while it was lean times for DevOpsDays Austin as well, that while it’s easier to give in fat times than in lean, the need is most in the lean times. So I took the idea to James and Karthik, my fellow core organizers. They went through the same cycle I had, from “But there’s a lot of risk and uncertainty and we just fought to get that money back” to “This is totally the right thing to do” in a short amount of time.
We already had a DoD Austin organizer meeting scheduled for last Friday, to touch base after a long time apart and talk about our plans and come to terms with “no 2021” and “plug into DoD Texas if you want to help with a virtual event” and all. This is a big financial decision so we brought it onto the agenda and put it to the whole organizer team to vote, and everyone was extremely in favor. Boyd was there and was surprised by it too, having no idea what his words had set in motion! Someone noted “we started DevOpsDays Austin from $0 before, we can do it again if we have to.” Luckily this isn’t busting us out and we’ll have enough for a venue down payment in 2022, but the sentiment is appreciated.
So I wanted to thank Boyd for the spark, all the DevOpsDays Organizers for setting the fire, and also all our previous DevOpsDays Austin organizers and attendees for providing the fuel. We really appreciate all the participants in our local tech community and love its passion for giving back and helping Austin and the surrounding area.
This morning I spoke to a lady from the Central Texas Food Bank and she said that donations are currently being tripled due to matches from a new donor that just came on, their Web site only says doubled but even getting your Web site updated promptly is difficult right now during the holidays and a pandemic!
In closing I’d like to encourage you to also consider if you can help others right now as well. It’s hard times, but we in tech are mostly pretty well off; there are many unemployed or having to work hard, public jobs during a plague to make ends meet. The generous nature of the Austin tech scene is one of the best and most distinct things about it – the sharing, collaboration, and openness are what makes it better and stronger IMO than some other areas’ tech communities. Help keep Austin weird and help your fellow humans this holiday season!
the agile admin 