Once upon a time, I was fortunate enough to attend DevOpsDays Denver. It was incredible, I had so much exposure to so many informative talks, community leaders, and great ideas. It was inspiring. I came home fired up. I was missing that, then Covid hit, and I just didn’t try to get involved.

At the end of summer last year I saw that DevOpsDays LA was a thing, and was happening around my birthday in ‘24, and happening in person! Heck yeah. We have family in LA and it’s a short 8-hour drive.

What I didn’t expect was that DevOpsDays LA was part of, or participating in, a much larger event called the Southern California Linux Expo, or SCaLE.

Even more exciting than one event about something I am passionate about is, a mega conference about many little geeky things I love.

Anyway, it was super fun. I can’t wait to go back next year. Now that I understand what the event is, I feel I can immerse more easily and connect more with vendors, developer relations teams, and all of the participants. I was a tad guarded and next time I would engage way more! Also, it was fun to dust off the camera and get a few shots :D

Some quick takeaways from the event:

Paul Tevis’s talk on “Three Heuristics for Fostering High-Trust, Generative Culture” was fantastic. I walked away with a very nice set of tools for looking at how I may be perceived by others in my organization, and how to shift back into the sweet spot using the three heuristics. It was all about the flow of information and how I could lead by example. Super relevant to my current role at Noble Studios.

Secrets management is going to be very feasible for us at Noble.

State of DevOps is, well, it’s just how a business runs now. It’s how we do things. It’s a culture, a toolchain, and YAML wrangling ;)

Shift Left on security makes perfect sense. I had a great conversation during the open group at DevOpsDays about security and how teams are running it in their workflows. A fun future attack vector we gotta think about now is like typo-squatting for AI, but for the hallucinations, it sometimes creates for packages that do not exist. Someone could just, create them, poison the data, and wreak havoc. Good times.

OpenSource is important.

There are a lot of amazing groups working to ensure that Open Source projects are of high quality and cared for, and that we are all educated in those regards so that we can choose Open Source packages to use in our projects or day to day with confidence and with security in mind.

These events are also important. It’s healthy to get away from the screens and get in the same room and talk.

Picked up some great ideas around measuring the value of community events to help ensure they continue to happen.