I’ve just spent an amazing week in London. I already had high hopes for this trip having been to DevOpsDays London earlier this year but I didn’t expect to be blown away by the events.
Attendees at both events were from all over Europe. I’m used to meeting people from different cultures and backgrounds at events in the USA but this was on a totally different scale.
As to be expected, culture and process were areas of pain that people are having a hard time dealing with. Tools are one of the easier things to bring into an environment. At DevOpsDays John Willis did an excellent presentation on Software Defined Networking. While this isn’t something I would mention, there was one thing he said that was really important. A lot of his talk was about tools and technology. John ended by reminding all of us, including himself, to continue to do CAMS not AMS. It’s too easy for those of us who are really passionate about technology to fall in love with tools and forget about culture.
There were many other great presentations and open space sessions at DevOpsDays. There was an excellent ignite session on the topic of Burnout in the industry. Based on what is coming from my Twitter feed, there is a lot of discussion about burnout and depression in the industry. It is healthy that this is being brought up for discussion. Although I didn’t get to attend the open space session on the topic, I’ll make sure I do at the next conference I attend that discusses it.
The next conference was Velocity. I’ve been to a few Velocity Conferences and this was the best yet. As someone who is extremely passionate about technology, some of the tricks and tips for getting extreme performance from websites and apps were extremely exciting. I’ve not played with web development for a while but I came away from the conference wanting to find reasons to try out some of the techniques demonstrated.
As much as the technology itself is exciting and important, time after time culture and process are highlighted in sessions, especially around accepting that failure will happen. I firmly believe that Serena’s Release Management solution can go a long way to help you tame your processes and help facilitate collaboration. Over the coming weeks we’ll be writing more about Serena’s process-centric view of release management, which can help you transform the way you work.
Finally, there were a couple of sessions on DevOps and continuous delivery in financial companies. I’ll write about those once I have a chance to review the slides and watch the sessions again. They were very exciting sessions and are great examples for Serena customers who would really like to change the way they work in risk averse environments but don’t know where to start.
