Last week was on of the best weeks lately. Arranging an event is easy if you have three months till deadline. Last week however you get the feeling you are forgetting stuff. Luckily we didn’t.
Devops day started the day before actually when Mark Burgess joined us. And on Wednesday John and Kris joined. We spent a fair deal of the morning discussing all kind of things. Devops / Webops sounds nice. But to be fair the main thing is a joint language (kris tm). And next to that doing great IT can only be done in a great environment / culture.
And that was the most stunning thing. Inuits, CFEngine, Etsy, Schuberg Philis. They all understand one thing very well. And that is that everything must fit like a glove if you want to build stuff that matters.
Your hiring / recruitment process must be right. We must care about the community by making and using the best open source can offer. We must care about the next phase of industrialization, namely the informazation of society. How do we work with information and how do we consume data and how do we learn doing so. What on earth is happening to our education system. You do not learn to be a good sysadmin or programmer in a lot of places. Massive room for opportunity here to take the lead as industry.
But of course the main topic was why do we all do stuff the way we do stuff. Why do we use CFEngine and Chef. Why do we use Nagios all over the place. Why do we all graph everything that moves and matters. Stunning to see that all mentioned companies approach things in a similar fashion. Of course there are changes. Etsy is a large web operation. Schuberg Philis has a lot of heterogeneous environments with a multi party set up (business owners, sysadmins and developers are often three different companies). Nevertheless we all believe we can build beautifull envrionments that we are proud of. Environments that enables the customers to do the things they need to do. And all of that with a superbe uptime, performance and scalability. And all of that with a shitload of fun while doing it. At the end we all want to do stuff that matters.
By the way I am not writing about the content of the event. That would have been a poor mans copy of the slides. Currently we are working with Kris / John and the video editting team to get this thing online. When we are ready, i’ll post the link. Trust me, those guys are good.
