Well, we had to skip 2 years in a row due to the pandemic, but we were finally able to have DevOpsDays Austin in person again in 2022! It’s our tenth anniversary of DoD Austin, we had the first one at National Instruments back in 2012, one of the early DevOpsDays in the US.
We had to move to a new venue, and used the beautiful University of Texas Etter-Harbin Alumni Center (our site lead Bill is a UT alum which makes it half price!). The Etter-Harbin Center is right across from the stadium where we had DoDA in the years leading up to the hiatus. It has plenty of great outdoor spaces, which we used for lunches and happy hours, as well as a great main ballroom with views of the outside. It worked great for our target of 350 attendees, and we think we could make it work for more in the future.
We were thinking and came across the perfect theme – it’s our tenth anniversary, and we’re just back from the pandemic, and DevOps is also just a little more than ten years old and at a weird inflection point that has people asking “is DevOps dead? Where does DevOps go from here?” So we decided that since we were also in the Alumni Center, the obvious theme was our 10 Year Class Reunion!
We don’t take our themes lightly at DevOpsDays Austin. We settled on a new theme for our talks – instead of the normal RFC for whatever technical and culture topics, we required all talks to be a retrospective format – reflecting on what you’ve learned over the years of DevOps and what you think the future holds. We had lots of great speakers, many of whom are long time parts of the DoD Austin community, both locals like Rob Hirschfeld, Christa Meck, Ross Dickey, and Victor Trac, as well as folks from other parts of the Earth like Patrick Debois, Damon Edwards, J. Paul Reed, Pete Cheslock, and Michael Cote, who all frequently come to Austin to share with us.
And we printed a yearbook, with pics of speakers from all the events, our tshirts over the years, and more! Very snazzy, and we had people sign each others’ yearbooks to add some fun to the hallway track. In fact, you can view the yearbook online and buy a hardcopy here if you want!
We did require COVID protocols – masking inside and (honor system) vaccine or test, and while it is a bummer to not see each others’ faces, it also resulted in only one person I know of getting COVID the week after, so well worth it.
We didn’t have to worry about sponsor interest! We sold out quickly. Here’s the ones I got snaps of!
Everything went great, and it was super to finally get back together and interact with our local DevOps community. J. Paul Reed led a great session where a retro was done on DevOps in general!
And one of the best things is that we managed to carry on our tradition of giving our excess proceeds to charity! I’ll do a separate post on that, but the short form is that we contributed $28,000 to LGBT-supporting charities, half to The Trevor Project and half to Out Youth here in Austin, bringing us to $100,000 given to charity over our 10 years in existence! Stay tuned for more details on that…
the agile admin 