Today, DryRun Security, came out of stealth as the co-founders James Wickett (me) and Ken Johnson (@cktricky) launched the company. To the readers of The Agile Admin, you’ll know that I post about security and its connection with devops from time to time.
We launched the company because the arc of the industry has created silos where legacy security solutions have been geared towards security professionals rather than those who write the software.
This leads to three significant gaps. The first is testing for security issues after it’s been deployed leads to wasted developer and security team cycles when problems are discovered. The second is many of the bugs being identified are not even relevant, resulting in false-positives. Finally, the third is application security teams lack an accurate picture of which code reviews require their expertise. This is further exacerbated by the sheer velocity and number of daily and weekly code updates. All of these problems lead to inaccurate, delayed, and often incorrectly prioritized security testing and ultimately , an overall less-secure codebase.
DryRun Security fixes the disconnect between security and developers by performing Contextual Security Analysis which runs where developers work. As a developer writes code, they dry-run security testing and analysis and get results back in near real time, which is where the name “DryRun” comes from. This type of testing builds the security context of the code and provides feedback to developers whenever they make changes or write new code.
“The disconnect between engineers and security testers is due to a lack of security context making it back to developers” said James Wickett, CEO and Co-Founder of DryRun Security, “DryRun Security was created to address this fundamental disconnect under the assumption that developers truly care about the security of the products they are building. With that assumption, we believe that security should be an integral part of the software development process. That’s why it’s our mission to provide engineers with a tool that makes it easy to identify and fix potential security bugs while the developer is working on that section of code.”
“At DryRun Security, we understand that once a developer can see the security context of their changes, they can make better decisions and create more secure applications. This is different from the way that testing has been happening over the past two decades which has made fixing bugs inefficient, driving up costs and creating unnecessary hurdles for developers and security professionals.” Said Ken Johnson, Co-Founder and CTO of DryRun Security. “I experienced these headaches firsthand, which is why I started DryRun Security with James. Our belief is that the solution we provide will give developers the ability to integrate contextual security analysis into their development workflow and fix issues before they become bigger problems.”DryRun Security is currently running a private beta for their product, and they are accepting signups to the list.
Hey all! James and I are preparing to revise our LinkedIn Learning course, DevOps Foundations, a three hour set of videos designed to orient beginners in the whole scope of DevOps.
We created the course in 2016 primarily because at the time there were no good introductions to DevOps. You needed to know what blogs to follow and what events to go to and that was it. Even the DevOps Handbook hadn’t come out yet. And this provided a very high barrier to entry to the field. And we believe in learning and collaboration so we knew what we had to do!
Since then, it’s been one of the top tech courses on LinkedIn Learning with over 400,000 learners so far and has generated a dozen other courses drilling down into detail in specific areas. The things that make it worth it to me is the people we run across who say “this helped me improve my career.” My favorite was one gentleman who pulled me aside at the Aqua Security booth at RSA back before the pandemic and said “Hey, I had just gotten out of the Army and was trying to get a good job, and so was looking at tech. Your course oriented me enough that I got a sales job here!” Being able to help people like that is a rare privilege and we really value it.
Please fill out our survey to let us know what you think are the key things someone needs to learn about DevOps – whether they have some existing dev or ops knowledge or are just getting into it!
Here’s the old table of contents for reference… A lot of this hasn’t changed, the basics are still the basics, but it has been 7 years and a lot has changed, some things to add, some things to change, some things to cut. Let us know your opinion!
DevOps Basics
What Is DevOps? – Understand the meaning of DevOps and why you might care about it.
DevOps Core Values: CAMS – Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing are the core values of DevOps.
DevOps Principles: The Three Ways – The Three Ways can guide your strategic approach to DevOps.
Your DevOps Playbook – There’s a developing list of patterns and methodologies that can help you transition to DevOps.
Ten Practices for DevOps Success: 10 through 6 – Tactical, pragmatic tips for DevOps success in your organization
Ten Practices for DevOps Success: 5 through 1 – Tactical, pragmatic tips for DevOps success in your organization
DevOps Tools – the Cart Or The Horse? – The role of tools in DevOps and tips for selecting and using tooling to achieve your end goal.
DevOps: A Culture Problem
The IT Crowd and the Coming Storm – Existing IT culture has both internal and external problems. Meanwhile, new challenges of scale and business cadence are pressing technology departments to change.
Use Your Words – Communication is the key to collaboration and solving problems when the stakes are high.
Do Unto Others – Build trust and respect and eliminate blame and hostility in your teams.
Throwing Things Over Walls – Break down the silos and establish a culture of responsibility and ownership, and align your teams to support the flow of concept to cash.
Kaizen: Continuous Improvement – Everything can be iterated upon to make it better – even yourself!
The Building Blocks of DevOps
DevOps Building Block: Agile – DevOps extends Agile principles to include deployment and operations.
DevOps Building Block: Lean – Understanding Lean can be the difference between a DevOps implementation that helps you achieve your company’s goals and one that’s just “the same but different.”
ITIL, ITSM, and the SDLC – Where does the “old school” fit in to a DevOps world?
Infrastructure Automation
Infrastructure As Code – Take a fundamentally different approach to building distributed systems whether in the datacenter or in the cloud.
Golden Image to Foil Ball – Learn about configuration mangement, automated provisioning, deployment and orchestration.
Immutable Deployment – With the rise of containers, different CM patterns are gaining currency.
Your Infrastructure Toolchain – Common tools in this space include Chef, Puppet, and Ansible but new container-based approaches like docker are on the rise. [Yes, this was before terraform and kubernetes, definitely places to update]
Continuous Delivery
Small + Fast = Better – Delivering small batches of change quickly reduces risk, improves quality, and restricts technical debt.
Continuous Integration Practices – Learn about Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment, which you need and how to get there.
The Continuous Delivery Pipeline
The Role Of QA – Move from manual testing to automated with Test Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior Driven Development (BDD).
Your CI Toolchain – From Github to Jenkins, your code pipeline consists of many different parts with specific functions.
Reliability Engineering
Engineering Doesn’t End With Deployment – If you build it, you run it and other patterns for reliability engineering.
Design For Operation – Theory – Building a system to be resilient is the highest leverage step in ensuring high uptime and low MTTR.
Design For Operation – Practice – Ops has learned hard lessons about resiliency over the years – take it into account when building your applications.
Operate For Design: Metrics and Monitoring – Operational support isn’t just keeping the systems up, it provides crucial feedback back into the development cycle. {Yes, the kids call this observability now]
Operate for Design: Logging
Your SRE Toolchain – Monitoring, troubleshooting, and metrics are a vital space in your tooling strategy.
Additional DevOps Resources
Unicorns, Horses, and Donkeys, Oh My – In an emerging discipline, going to events to learn from other expert practitioners is your fastest route to success.
Ten Best DevOps Books You Need to Read – There’s a growing number of books on DevOps, here’s our top 10 reading list.
Navigating The Series of Tubes – DevOps information on the Web is fragmented and hard to find sometimes; here’s some of the best places to watch.
The Future of DevOps
Cloud to Containers to Serverless – Profound changes to our computing model have arrived to challenge many of our established practices.
The Rugged Frontier of DevOps: Security – Security is changing and is rapidly uptaking the DevOps movement, we cover the major implications here. {Yes. the kids call this DevSecOps now]
Conclusion
Next Steps: Am I a DevOp now? – Learn what next steps you should pursue for growing in DevOps understanding and practice.
Well, the Agile Admins have handed the reins of DevOpsDays Austin off to a new generation! And DoDA 2023 is coming up next week! I’ll be there, participating rather than wrangling for once…
Shaun Mouton, one of the new core organizers, asked me to share an annotated overview of items which may be of interest to attendees! So read on, and hope to see you out at the conference.
Austin musical notes
for Visitors and Interested Parties
DevOpsDays Austin 2023 is coming up quite soon, and I thought I’d mention for the out-of-towners and folks who might want to know that there are some decent shows happening around the same time:
May 3rd:
The Black Dahlia Murder w/Terror, etc at the Mohawk
Metalheads, trudge through some sludge. TBDM is here.
Daisy The Great at Antone’s
If twee indie pop heavy on harmony is your thing get your fill of Brooklyn’s darling sextet at Antone’s. Portland’s Olive Klug is playing too and this will probably be a really fun show.
The Drakes at Saxon Pub
The Drakes put on a tremendous rock n roll show at one of Austin’s classic venues.
Arc Angels at Gruene Hall
I can’t make this show and I’m bummed about it. You should go catch this Hill Country supergroup at one of Texas’ finest music venues.
Warren Hood at ABGB
I’ve heard good things about his shows but haven’t made it yet. Still, I feel pretty comfortable recommending this one.
Wednesdays with W.C. Clark at Pinballz Kingdom in Buda
The Godfather of Austin Blues lays it down. W.C.’s still got it and you can get it too.
Libby and the Loveless
Sam’s Town Point is a great place to hang out and see a show, and L&tL (nobody calls them that) will play a fine mix of country standards.
Michael Hale Organ Trio & Sketch at C-Boy’s Heart & Soul Bar
If you’re coming to Austin for the first time or haven’t been to C-Boy’s you might want to make this show. Great venue, great music.
Matt the Electrician & friends at The 04 Center
Matt’s fantastic, this is likely to be a great show, and the 04 is a good venue for them.
May 4th:
Lil Wayne at Stubb’s
I might skip out on evening events if I can make this one. Sorry y’all, it’s Tha Carter.
Tennis at ACL Live at the Moody Theater
Tennis is a bit precious, but if you’re into it they’re a lot of fun. Dance it out at the Moody.
Barbara Nesbitt & Friends at The Continental Club Gallery
I’m getting a little annoyed writing these now, there’s so much to see. Nesbitt’s voice is a delightful slice of Americana.
Two Step Lessons
You’ve got good choices if you want to learn how to two-step on Thursday. Sam’s Town Point and the White Horse cater to newbies who want to learn how to put a little twang in their electric slide.
Large Brush Collection, Little Mazarn, Jenny Carson at Feels So Good
FSG started out as a differently named screenprinting shop and showed up at a few local tech conferences making shirts for attendees to-order. They’re chill people and put on a great series of shows at the shop.
Greg Koch at the 04 Center
Pretty sure Koch is going to tear the A-frame roof of the sucker. If you’re into groovy six-string acrobatics this will be a fun outing.
The Arc Angels with Madam Radar at Riverbend Centre
Again, probably going to have to miss this one For Reasons, but I’m not happy about it. Grab this chance to see some of our local greats burn the house down.
Manny Velazquez at the Little Longhorn Saloon
Manny V knows country music, puts on a good show, and Austin’s lucky to have him. Classic country sound at a fun little venue.
May 5th:
The Blues Specialists at The Continental Club
The Blues Specialists have been holding down the Continental Club for ages with their Texas-style jump blues. If that sounds even a little like your jam, it’s absolutely your jam. Get you to the Continental, friend.
The Psychedelic Furs at ACL Live at the Moody Theater.
You a Furs fan? This would be a decent opportunity to catch them. The Moody Theater is a fine place to see a show. Oh, and apparently Evan Dando too, as a treat.
Charlie Robison at Gruene Hall
Charlie Robison is a genuine Austin treasure, and Gruene Hall is a stellar venue to see him perform. One of the finest singer-songwriters to come out of a town overflowing with them.
Wild Child at Emo’s
Austin indie pop band, they’ve got a lot of fun songs. The vocalist reminds me of my favorite New Orleans chanteuse.
Austin tasty eats
local food recommended by a local (it me, I grew up here)
Start here with this guide from Paul Czarkowski and friends for stuffing your face around this place. It could be somewhat out of date, things change pretty fast around here. I’ll add some notes of my own here even though I’ve contributed to that before:
Central TX BBQ
Don’t bother with the BBQ sides, it’s all about the meat. Have a nice salad somewhere else before and after or maybe a smoothie from Juiceland. Kerlin BBQ has sadly closed up shop, although they do still sell tasty kolaches. Gourdough’s may have closed too, which would be a blessing for my waistline.
Quesabirria tacos
These are still pretty hot right now, but prepare yourself. You dip the tacos in the cup of consomme and it all drips, this ain’t for fancy dress occasions. Bring extra napkins, and eat em fast before the tacos cool off from the griddle.
La Tunita 512 – 2400 Burleson Rd
this was one of Austin’s first offerings for quesabirria de res, and they’re delicious.
Actual Tacos
There’s Tacodeli and Torchy’s for the white people food that’s pretty tasty, and then there are tacos. These are taco joints.
Cuantos Tacos – 1108 E 12th St
Located about a mile away from the Alumni Center, Cuantos serves the sort of tacos you might find in CDMX. They’re good.
Veracruz All Natural (and Veracruz Fonda)
Somewhat fancy, somewhat down-to-earth, Veracruz is tasty and I am happy to recommend them to you.
Other Items Of Interest
If you’re spending any amount of time here and need something not covered by this guide feel free to holler at me on whatever social media platform you favor and can find me, I’ll be happy to come up with something that’ll put a smile on your face. I’m glad you’re going to be at the conference, please say hi or wave in my general direction if you get a chance!
James and I were revising one of our LinkedIn Learning courses, DevOps Foundations: Infrastructure as Code to keep up with the times, and while we were out there filming we knocked out some new courses as well!
DevOps for Managers talks about DevOps from the management perspective. What do you need to know, and how can you best unlock the success of the teams you’re working with when they are – or want to – excel at DevOps?
DevOps Antipatterns explores some common pitfalls that people fall into when starting out (or, even, later…)
Check them out! For reference here’s our whole curriculum that the agile admins have put out to help you in your path to thriving in tech.
DevOps Foundations: Lean and Agile (Karthik, Ernest) – Lean and Agile inform DevOps at a fundamental level, and adopting their methods will contribute to your success.
James and I are working on a LinkedIn Learning course entitled “DevOps for Managers” and I wanted to share some of the books we love that we’ve found helpful in preparing it! We’d love to hear books you think are indispensable for DevOps managers. We’ve generally omitted general management books like First, Break All The Rules and DevOps non-management-specific books like Continuous Delivery, trying to focus on the specific intersection of tech and management.
The Lean Mindset: Ask The Right Questions by Mary and Tom Poppendieck shows how to focus your thoughts and iterate towards good products, including your internal products and services.
I’ve heard about Camille Fournier’s The Manager’s Path, Julie Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager, and Lara Hogan’s Resilient Management but haven’t read any of them yet so can’t vouch.
Well, after ten years of running DevOpsDays Austin, James, Karthik, and I feel like it’s time to let a new generation of leaders have a crack at it!
DevOpsDays Austin 2023 planning is underway with a great organizer team – some experienced, some new. I’d like to introduce your new Austin core organizers to you!
Laura Santamaria is a Lead Developer Advocate at Dell and a long time supporter of the Austin tech user group scene, who’s been involved in running Austin DevOps and CloudAustin.
Daria Ilic is Director of People Operations at Six Nines IT (working with me, yay!) and has been an organizer for DevOpsDays Austin and CloudAustin.
Shaun Mouton is a Principal Software Engineer at Mastercard and has been an organizer with DevOpsDays Austin for many years.
All three are great people and we really look forward to seeing how the event continues to evolve under their able leadership! They’ve put together a great organizer team and are full speed ahead, so make sure and buy those sponsorships now and submit talks when they open up!
We also send out retrospective surveys to our attendees, speakers, sponsors, volunteers, and even our fellow organizers to find out how we’re doing and get an idea of what we should do better on (or keep doing) in the future!
To sum up, however, it’s looking good! Our last surveys were from 2019, from our last pre-pandemic DevOpsDays Austin, so we have a previous number to compare to.
Our attendee NPS was up to 77 (44 responses) from 62 (50 responses). And the things people loved were, basically, the personal interaction. Community, people, discussions, and openspaces were the most cited positives by far. We knew people had been missing that for a couple years now so our retrospective format and event plan were specifically designed to promote small group interactions.
The gripes were more varied. Primary was the food, which is fair enough. While we don’t intend to change from a boxed lunch format – it leaves so much more time for the actual conference, so we left fancy catered lunches behind long ago – we were forced to use the venue caterer and they ran out of food especially veggie options, and we had asked for breakfast tacos both mornings and on day two the breakfast was what I can only call “leftover meat bits.” So room for improvement, with the understanding that boxed lunches are here to stay, but we’ll definitely see what we can do about better options and especially making sure there’s not shortages of anyone’s dietary needs.
The other leading concern we’re just plain going to ignore, and here’s why. It was “the retro format – but what about technical talks, what about content for newbies?”
At DevOpsDays Austin we explicitly reject the assumption that all events must be the same generic thing every time. We specifically change our format every year. We’ve had the Monsters of DevOps where we went for flying in big keynoters (including all the authors of the DevOps Handbook) and doing everything up huge; we’ve had DevOps Unplugged where talks were voted in on site and there were no sponsor tables. This year we had a “class reunion” format with talks only being 20 minute “retrospectives” from what the speaker’s learned over their time in DevOps (some speakers were experienced, others were new voices). We very, very clearly talked about this format on our website, social media, and emails to attendees and sponsors. In the end, people just don’t read, and there’s nothing really to do about that. And we won’t be doing the retro format two years in a row, we’ll keep mixing it up!
Organizer feedback was good (we have 20 organizers), up slightly, with everyone enjoying working with the group, and some concerns about unclear roles and roles already taken. That’s always a challenge – we have a lot of organizers but not all of them are up to actually leading something. We have people volunteer to own roles and then encourage them to reach out to the others/the others to chip in when we need something, but that doesn’t always go well, which is frustrating for everyone. In the end, most roles need someone who can commit to consistent participation over the planning period (there’s a couple specialty roles like making signage that can be backloaded, but not many). But we want to be inclusive and not tell people “no, take the year off if you can’t be putting in a couple hours a week including making the organizer calls, and truly own something.” We’ve wrestled with this for 10 years, no clear answer is in sight.
Speakers love speaking at the event. NPS was 92, slightly up from 90 in 2019. They love the audience, how supportive and welcoming they are, and how low stress and chill the experience is. There’s always some AV issues as a fly in the ointment – we do AV checks but not everyone shows up for them.
Volunteers have a good experience too. NPS was 88, slightly down from 94 but still good; we try to make sure that the load isn’t too much on any given volunteer so they can also enjoy the event. Posting the openspace topics is always a challenge each year; we tweet out photos and then desperately type them into the sessionize, but a bunch of attendees are social media impaired I guess and it’s hard to get the schedule to everyone, but there’s not a lot of options given that openspaces are predicated on doing the agenda immediately previous; I’m not sure more time would help short of printing out copies or having live monitors everywhere.
Sponsor feedback was down from 60 to 50 NPS. They do like the audience and authentic content. The main problem was the new venue and unclear flow meant that the platinum sponsor rooms were more out of the way than we’d planned (we gave them tables in the gold area as well once this became clear). And then the general sponsor gripes about it not being a good lead gen event. We always tell sponsors this is a good participation event, not a good lead gen event, no badge scanners, no sponsor list, etc., but a previously mentioned people don’t read, plus the teams being sent out aren’t the people buying the sponsorships and often just assume they’ll be getting a standard conference experience. We sell out every year so I’ll worry about it when that stops.
There’s one other thing worth mentioning, which is that we did require masking at the event and asked people to either be vaccinated or test prior to the event.
One the one hand, a couple sponsors and attendees griped about the masking.
On the other hand, despite other events resulting in superspreading (Kubecon EU, RSA, even some DevOpsDays events):
So, with all due respect, we are very happy with our choice and that we had a safe event. No one likes wearing masks. If you don’t like it enough to not come – don’t come. Hopefully it won’t be necessary next year.
Everything was pretty good! There was one issue, though – in all the survey sub-questions, there was a drop in the perceived friendliness of the organizer team, so we’re going to make some changes there – stay tuned to hear what!
We were psyched to be back and meeting in person for DevOpsDays Austin 2022 this year! Charitable donation is a part of our Austin tech culture and very important to us, and since it was our 10th anniversary we aimed to hit a total of $100,000 in charitable donations since we started the event in 2012. And we did it! We’re happy to have $28,000 to give to local charities after our event this year.
That left us with the question of who to donate to. We like to choose things that fill the greatest need in our community at the time, and strongly bias towards supporting Austin area charities. Our state government decided to help us make our decision by starting a pogrom of discrimination against LGBTQ+ Texans.
Many of our colleagues in the Austin technology community are gay, lesbian, transgender, nonbinary, or identify with other nontraditional gender identities and sexual preferences, or have family members that are. I myself have a transgender son who I’ve loved and supported through his transition, and now he’s a happy, healthy adult. We find the attempts of the Texas government to institutionalize hostile behavior towards them deeply unacceptable and want to find ways to support them.
We looked initially at charities like Equality Texas that are working to ensure the rights of LGBTQ+ Texans, but as we discussed we wanted our funds to go directly to the benefit of people in need, and not all go to the lawyers fighting the long fight.
Since $28,000 is a lot, we decided to split it up into two $14,000 donations. After some research we nominated two recipients, Out Youth and The Trevor Project, and brought them to the DoDA organizer team for a vote, which they enthusiastically approved.
We selected Out Youth for our first donation as a deeply local Austin organization directly supporting LGBT youth.
For 32 years, Out Youth has supported Central Texas LGBTQIA+ youth and young adults by providing safe places where they are loved, acknowledged, and accepted for exactly who they are. Their life-saving and life-changing programs and services ensure these promising young people develop into happy, healthy, successful adults. Out Youth hosts a variety of programs to keep their youth mentally and physically safe such as drop-in times at their youth community center, by offering free individual counseling and group therapy sessions, and through their in-school-support services. To find out more information about ways to get involved and about their services, please visit outyouth.org today.
It’s funny that our relationships with these charities usually start with us showing up with a big surprise donation and then after that getting deeply involved with the organization; we plan to go tour their house and spread the word about volunteer opportunities with them to the Austin technology community.
Not only do I have a transgender son, but also fellow Agile Admin and conference organizer James lost a brother to suicide. So while The Trevor Project isn’t Austin based per se, it does help many Austinites, and its mission of suicide prevention among LGBTQ+ youth is deeply and personally meaningful to us both. Therefore we chose them for our second donation this year.
The Trevor Project has worked to save young lives by providing support through our free and confidential crisis programs on platforms where young people spend their time — online and on the phone: TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat and TrevorText. We also run TrevorSpace, the world’s largest safe space social networking site for LGBTQ youth, and operate innovative education, research, and advocacy programs.
The Trevor Project’s research has found that having at least one accepting adult in an LGBTQ young person’s life reduces their risk of suicide by 40%.
Transgender and nonbinary youth who reported having pronouns respected by all of the people they lived with attempted suicide at half the rate of those who did not have their pronouns respected by anyone with whom they lived.
“You are lovable” – this is one of the most common phrases The Trevor Project’s crisis counselors share with youth in crisis.
According to Trevor’s research 42% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, including more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth.
You can sign up to become a volunteer counselor on their site; there’s extensive training and it requires a year commitment.
In closing, we appreciate the work Out Youth and The Trevor Project are doing and hope that others will look into finding ways to support them as well.
To the LBGTQ+ technologists in Austin, you are welcome, and both DevOpsDays Austin and other user groups we run like CloudAustin have published codes of conduct that don’t allow any hostile behavior towards you at our events, and we look forward to interacting with you there. Happy Pride Month!
Hey all! There are some stories that were foundational in my path to DevOps that I think illustrate larger issues pretty well. I use them a lot when I do talks or whatever but I figured I might as well put some of them down here to inspire readers.
I was working at National Instruments in the IT department back in the early 2000s. I ran the Web Systems team, alongside a bunch of technology focused teams – the UNIX Admins, the Windows Admins, Notes Admins, Network Admins, DBAs, and various others.
It took 6 weeks to get a new server for the Web. We’d say what we wanted, but then the UNIX admins would spec it out, and then order it from Dell, wait 2 weeks for fulfillment, then it’d come, then the network team would rack and jack it in the server room, the UNIX admins would put the OS on it, various other teams would get their pound of flesh, and then eventually it would get sent to us so we could put our software on it and then let the app teams use it. Not exactly quick turnaround.
Then came VMWare, the shining new star! Their sales rep showed up and said “You know, you can have a new server in 15 minutes.” We went out to a live sales demo and were like “this is very cool.” I asked the sales team, “so I could make the root read only for security reasons and write everything to external storage right?” They thought a minute, never having considered that. “Yes? That’s actually a really good idea.” A coworker and I fist-bumped each other.
Anyway, so we bought it, yet another technology vertical team was formed to own it, and after some degree of enterprise folderol it was in place.
So now when I needed a new server, guess how long it took me?
Four weeks. All we had removed was the 2 weeks of Dell fulfillment. Not 15 minutes.
When the procurement was slow anyway, it was just kind of accepted that 2 weeks turned into 6 weeks in the process. “Well, someone has to carefully assign an IP address, or else everything would be chaos!” But then when it was 15 minutes turning into 4 weeks purely based on our own internal friction (the actual work involved being much less than a day end to end) – suddenly it became clear how much of our own problem we were generating.
But it was hard to fix. There is inevitably niche protection in an environment like that. “Hey UNIX admins, you put cfengine on the boxes to manage them? Can we use that to load on our software too?” “No.” “Hey, can we get our own Web DBA so Web initiatives aren’t always bottom-feeding off the big ERP initiatives?” “No.” Tossing a ball over walls from silo to silo inevitably resulted in complex handoff processes and wait times and resource contention.
So then when we moved to the R&D department and started working up some SaaS products, and we were faced with the option of using our own integral IT department – we said “Absolutely not. There’s this new Amazon Web Services thing and we’re going to do it all ourselves.” “But what about all the value those specialists bring?”
Well, it’s not the specialists’ fault – but the one day worth of specialty benefit they brought was stapled to 4 weeks of sitting on hands, and no one felt it was their role to fix that endemic process problem in the org. I don’t care if you’re offering me Linus Torvalds to fix my Linux problems, if you offer me “a day of Linus and then 4 weeks in solitary,” I’ll do without, thank you very much.
This was 2009, it was before “DevOps,” but we immediately realized that having a product team responsible end to end for the product – code, systems, security, etc. – allowed us to deliver high quality in a fraction of the time that we were used to. It was intoxicating. That’s actually where we Agile Admins met and why we still hang out together today, because we all went through the experience of the gig actually becoming fun again!
DevOpsDays Austin believes in supporting the local community that supports us, the techies of Austin. As we’ve grown and we’ve been able to end some of our years with extra money from our sponsors. We are careful to be thrifty with the event and rely on our volunteers to do a lot, and all DevOpsDays events run on a nonprofit basis; one of the few core rules of all DevOpsDays is that the events are not for individual or corporate profit.
The Austin technical community is a cross-section of, and part of, our community. We have a diverse set of individuals from many backgrounds and neighborhoods all around the area. As technologists we are largely blessed with decent salaries and technology companies have lots of money, and many of the keenest needs in the area need relatively little funding to make a real difference. We believe it’s our responsibility as a part of the community to use part of what we make to give back to support the most vulnerable among us. Therefore we’ve made it a point to use our excess funds to give back to charities that directly help those most in need.
We started DevOpsDays Austin in 2012 from nothing, and relied on a free venue (courtesy of my employer at the time, National Instruments). We made enough to make a down payment on a venue in 2014, and by 2015 we were confident enough of our finances that we considered our first charitable donation.
The Charity Page In Our 2022 Yearbook
The natural choice was the Central Texas Food Bank (at the time, known as the Capital Area Food Bank), a well known long time Austin charity that combats hunger in the area. We gave $5000, and we also did a charity drive at the event, handing out leftover t-shirts and swag from the previous two years to those who made a donation of their own, which sent another $2600 to the food bank.
In 2016 we moved to a new, larger, much more expensive venue (the Darrell K. Royal Texas Memorial Stadium out at UT Austin) so we could let more people attend DevOpsDays. That put us at the limit of our finances for a couple years, especially with our 2017 “Monsters of DevOps” blowout conference with many international speakers and great fun events. But by 2018 we had that venue dialed in as well and had $20,000 left over that we decided to donate to charity. That year, instead of sending all the donation to one charity, we let each of our 20 organizers send $1000 to a charity of their choice. This ended up driving our helpful accountant Laura at ConferenceOps batty trying to get proper tax receipts from everyone, however, and we promised her we wouldn’t do that again.
Then in 2019 we had a great event, sponsors were in a right frenzy to get in and we had to add more sponsor booths to accommodate them – which was a lot of work, but left us also with a lot of leftover money ($25,000, off a conference with only a $200k total budget). We weren’t sure how we could be the most effective with a gift like this, and one of our organizers said “Did you know… There’s a new project here in Austin that builds miniature houses for the homeless in a beautiful community?” And that’s how we were introduced to the Community First! Village, a quickly growing and very effective outgrowth of Mobile Loaves and Fishes to house the homeless. And it turns out $25,000 is exactly how much it takes to build one of those homes. Our organizers enthusiastically approved the donation and we went out and did a great tour of the site, and many of us have returned as volunteers since.
And then the hard times came. During the pandemic, DevOpsDays Austin was on ice. In fact, we had planned on moving to an even more expensive hotel venue and had a down payment in place when the lockdown came, and we had to get a lawyer into play to get our deposit back.
But the needs of the community weren’t on hold. We have many Black and brown technologists in our community, and the high profile brutality directed at them was completely unacceptable. Long time friend of DevOpsDays Austin, John Wills, started a fundraiser for Black Lives Matter around making a quilt with all his DevOpsDays shirts (many of which were from Austin) in 2020, and we felt compelled to donate $2000 of the more than $12,000 he raised.
DevOpsDays Shirt Quilt
Then we were in the long night of lockdown. We weren’t doing anything from a DevOpsDays Austin perspective in 2021, though there was a virtual DevOpsDays Texas conference to fill in some of the gap. But as jobs and aid dried up, hunger became a critical need again in Austin. Fellow organizer Boyd Hemphill encouraged people to help out and volunteer during a virtual meetup, and his words made my conscience burn till I brought it to my fellow DevOpsDays Austin organizers to see if we could dip into our reserves and help. They all enthusiastically approved a $10,000 donation to our old friends the Central Texas Food Bank again.
Two donations without any revenue, that’s good enough till we can have an event again, right? Well, you’d think, and then Russia went and invaded Ukraine.
While we’re an Austin organization and we’ve always given to help out in Austin directly, we have many Ukrainians as part of our local tech community. I worked with many of them hand in hand while I was running teams at Bazaarvoice, as we had a great relationship with the Ukrainian consulting company Softserve. We brought many of them here to Austin to work with us, we went out together, I had toasted them with “Slava Ukraini!” Many of our organizers had similar experiences. And since we don’t like bullies around here, that riled us up. After a discussion along the lines of “well, we started from nothing once, we can do it again if we have to,” we donated $10,000 to Ukrainian relief organizations Razom for Ukraine and Nova Ukraine.
And that brings us up to date with the past, but we finally managed to have DevOpsDays Austin again! In May, we got a great venue (the University of Texas Alumni Center, at half price courtesy of Bill our venue lead being an UT alum) and planned for a slightly smaller than usual (350 masked attendees, to hedge against super-spreading) conference on our 10 year anniversary – the DevOpsDays Austin 10 Year Class Reunion.
Since it was our 10th anniversary, we did a yearbook. And when I put the charitable donation page together for the yearbook, I realized we’d given $72,000 to charity over the years. 10 years and an even $100,000 sounded mighty nice.
The conference went great, and all those sponsors have been saving up their marketing money wondering what to do with it. After some laborious running of numbers I realized we could free up the $28,000 donation to get to that bar and leave enough for us to make a venue down payment the next year.
As we contemplated this year’s donation our Texas state government decided to openly attack the LGBT+ citizens of our state. Many of those in our technical community we meet with every month in user groups are gay, lesbian, transgender, binary, and so on, and this is a direct attack on many of our coworkers, colleagues, and friends. And not just them, but their children.
As a result we gave $14,000 to The Trevor Project, a national service that provides suicide prevention hotlines for LGBT+ youth, $14,000 to Out Austin, a local place for youth of all sexual orientations and gender identities. I’ll write a separate post about those organizations and why them, and more importantly how you can help.
But in the end we’ve been very happy that we’ve been able to use our position as techies in the tech hotspot of Austin to consistently give back. We’d challenge other conferences, tech companies, and individual technologists to do so as well – especially to reputable charities that directly help those who need it.
I hope that DevOpsDays Austin can continue to give back in this way over the next ten years too!
the agile admin 