Twenty-six hours awake and counting during this conversation, after running a 24-hour multi-track charity conference. It all started with a simple tweet, then people believing in the idea, then more joining. The ops background helped: planning failure modes, having backups for backups. The fundraising results exceeded imagination – a slow start that suddenly boomed as people bought tickets and donated.
The 10-year DevOpsDays reunion in Ghent was a surreal experience. Day zero brought together organizers from around the world – close to 65 events a year at that point. Back in my hometown, in an old theater, looking into an audience where I knew person after person and their story of growing in the community, helping others, creating this chain reaction. My son once asked why I did not trademark devops. Family puts things in perspective. There was never a plan. The openness and willingness of the devops community, someone once told me, is a reflection of my character – and that is the biggest compliment I could receive.
The grassroots model of organizing worked because you could see people’s interests from their communication on Twitter, even without ever meeting them. I organized DevOpsDays events in cities where I had never met the local organizers in person. Remote collaboration was always part of it. COVID just made the broader industry appreciate that remote collaboration works.
On the future of devops: I do not care too much about predicting where the label goes. It has become embedded in how people think. SRE, observability, serverless – new terms keep emerging. I would hope the devops and agile communities reconnect, since they are talking about the same things at different conferences. Devops as a meme – the smallest unit of cultural information – will keep being there forever. People will build ideas on top of it, and that is what matters.
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This summary was generated using AI based on the auto-generated transcript.