DevOps Barcelona 2018

I talked about the mindset

Video is just out. Slides are here. Share your feedback with me if you watch it! :)

We hear a lot:
“DevOps is not people!”
“DevOps is not a team!”
“DevOps is not the tools.”
“It is a mindset.”

We hardly ever hear stories of how to adopt this mindset though. What do you do to embrace this idea? How do you make your people, teammates, or coworkers understand it?

I have been in the heart of this for the last two years, and as a blogger, I love collecting stories. I gathered stories and experiences on my way to becoming a sound Software Engineer who adopts the mindset of DevOps. Then, I said, why am I not talking about this?

Before doing so, I asked myself first, how did I do that? How did I learn this on my journey? I was a Junior Engineer when I started in this area; now I will be giving a talk about it. It should be worth doing.

Because I was finding my way, at every step I asked myself;
“What do I like about what I do?”
“Why am I doing what I am doing at this moment?”
“What value does this create in my work environment?”

These questions were mostly for myself; to find out if I like what I am doing, if they motivate me, and if they do, why?

I noticed that these questions were powerful. Every time I had found an answer, I have grown into it. Besides loving my job, they helped me learn a lot about the mindset. Every time something bad/interesting/weird happened, I took a lesson away from it. I collected these stories, and then shared them in a talk. What is amazing about this, is that I will be collecting even more stories during my career and this talk will develop and grow and become more and more effectual.

My talk is titled: “DevOps Story: Two Years of Adopting the mindset.”

No no no, I did not talk about my cat. ^^

It had one chapter about using Configuration Management tools to give the idea of which kind of mistakes we do while trying to get the best out of the tools. That topic was followed with why idempotency is essential.

You are definitely doing something wrong there.

It had another chapter where I talked about how to decide when to automate. I have a story about that, and it says it all. See in the video. :)

It had another chapter about alerting, communication and documentation.

I had one sentence I kept repeating towards the end;

If you can’t automate it, document it.

Since I touched on these topics with real-life examples, people were able to empathise with me. Audiences engage more if they can relate to the stories because it makes them think of their own experiences. I was incredibly touched by how many people reached out to me after to share their stories.

The audience was also brave to give me lots of feedback; they were humble, they really welcomed the talks in a significant manner. We learned a lot from each other.

DevOps Barcelona was one of the first conferences around this specific topic, and I loved it so much. It was fantastic to be interested in every single talk, and I learned a lot of new things that I was excited to go back and try out. I made friends with members in the audience as well as from speakers who were from Hashicorp, Docker, Facebook, Schibsted, ElasticSearch etc. It was a complete blast!

The organisers should be proud of themselves for the success of the event. I am sure; it will be even better next year. You raised the bar quite high. :)

My company trivago, was super supportive after I announced that I would be talking at the conference. They paid for my expenses and during my preparation, my colleagues were incredibly encouraging. With our Talent Attraction team, we even created these little flyers for the event. What makes this even more awesome is that I got to design this list of tools. The Pokemon idea belongs to my dear teammate Arne Claus whom I love working with.

Everyone loved the cards! I was super happy to see people engaging.

Last but not least, I would like to thank the main organizers Ricard Clau, Carlos Buenosvinos, Christian Soronellas, and all the other volunteers who helped to make this event possible, all the great speakers that I learned a lot from, all the people I met from the audience who were super brave to come and give their feedback to me and also share their stories about the DevOps mindset. I know that it takes courage.

I, of course, appreciate my company trivago, my colleagues and my friends who supported my journey.

My next blog post will be about public speaking. Stay tuned. :)

Love,

Busra