devopsdays 2016

There was a lot of useful info but these are the things that stuck out to me.
http://www.devopsdays.org/events/2016-minneapolis/program/

Overall

As a developer it seemed that vast majority of the content was for people with an ops focus. We need to help with better content for the dev side of devops. Based on a raise of hands the split was about even for conference attendees.

Working with Marketing and Sales:

• Invite to demos. Record video and details in documentation so they can review later
• Roadmapping meetings with representives from all groups

• Get rid of the game of telephone and bring everyone together. Talk to other groups directly instead of depending on others to always filter their content.
• Know other groups: from goals to pains

Making good choices with software

• Code is the enemy
• Resist software sprawl
• Control/friction for new things on critical path
• Correlate risk with startup timeline and use risk on differentiators
• Replacement plan must prioritize getting rid of the old
• Use humans for core features
• Celebrate removal, deprecation, and refactoring because celebrated patterns will be repeated

Open Spaces

We need more developer focused discussions.
I started a discussion on monitoring for developers. Others used different tools like Datadog and Splunk that may be interesting to check out. Some developers had much less access to production – especially if production had sensitive data and needed to have PCI compliance. It is important to use both tools and provide instrumentation monitoring in code.
In internal discussions another developer-focused topic thrown out was how development deals with ops scripts. They aren't our main focus and are often written differently than a developer would write them.

Bias

I'm interested in both the methodology and outcome of https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html