Last weekend, Chef was proud to sponsor and participate at DevOpsDays NYC 2016. This multi-city event brings developers and sysadmins together to iterate on past learnings and present new findings on ways to better the interactions between teams. Replete with donuts (vegan options included), coffee, and conversations about better communication and inclusive cultures, DoD NYC 2016 was a huge success.
The first day kicked off with Chef’s very own Victoria Jeffrey sharing the new InSpec 1.0 release. Victoria presented how compliance as code can enable organizations to better test their infrastructure and reduce resource bottlenecks as you deploy new code.
The morning continued with presentations on application security, effective scaling, optimizing for site reliability, and empathetic communication.
With plenty of food for thought, it was time for refueling with an awesome lunch and networking at the booths! Chef managed to dish out well over 50 t-shirts in just two hours, and shared details on our latest product releases: Chef Automate, Habitat, and InSpec.
Once settled, the day continued with Ignite Talks from some of the community, including Bridget Kromhout, Jason Yee, and Aaron Atwell, which dovetailed directly into the open space conversations. This represented an opportunity for attendees to discuss in small groups topics ranging from culture change in large organizations, addressing burnout, ChatOps, mentorship and training, and DBA’s and their roles in DevOps. These conversations were a great way to share in the dialogue and connect with peers from across the industry.
Saturday is generally a day reserved for lounging about and doing the tasks you couldn’t complete during the week. Fortunately, the DevOps community is passionate, and the attendance was still bustling on an early Saturday morning. The coffee was fresh, the eggs were hot, and the croissants light and fluffy.
Once thoroughly stuffed, attendees kicked off day two with an insight conversation around how user experience design can (and should) address unconscious biases in developers and users. The next two sessions focused primarily on learning in a DevOps organization. They were very informative and spoke to the need for iteration not just on code development, but on ourselves as well.
The afternoon continued with Ignite Talks focused on advances in systems, DevOps, and infrastructure as code. Open spaces included conversations on agile processes, the do’s and dont’s of interviews, as well as balancing control between the dev and ops teams.
The day ended with a sincere thank you to the community and appreciation for the coordinators who made it happen. A huge shoutout also goes to Microsoft for sponsoring the event, providing the space and a very welcoming reception team.