DevOps is meant to be collaborative. It’s about shared experiences — and so is ChefConf. Agile development practices teach us the technique of pair programing, so it only makes sense to extend that philosophy to pair conference attending.
As you’re planning your attendance for the DevOps conference of the year, we encourage you to register at least one representative from each of your development, operations, and leadership teams.
With an average of seven sessions per hour — each day — you as an individual simply cannot take in all that ChefConf has to offer. A one person experience will lead to a one-sided perspective, or, in other words, the opposite of DevOps.
When two or three or more individuals from you organization attend together, you’ll have the advantage of consuming more relevant content to accelerate your organization’s DevOps transformation and successful usage of Chef. Not to mention you’ll be living out the collaborative, shared experience that is core to the DevOps philosophy.
Of course, a successful transformation is not just about the practitioners that use Chef; it also requires executive buy in. To further drive transformation, you need the “sandwich approach”. With managers on one side and practitioners on the other — the middle is where you meet (or meat, or vegetables if you’re vegetarian). The shared experience of attending ChefConf to learn new skills and best practices — together — is that middle ground.
ChefConf is a great place to start building a community of Chef users and managers within your company. It can help you foster relationships with other folks in your department and from other teams. You’ll also see how collaboration is happening at other companies.
In addition to dozens of technical sessions, you’ll find talks about the soft skills of DevOps, how to explain Chef and the DevOps movement in high-level business terms, how to help developers get better at operations, and how to bring team’s closer with shared goals.
We also just added three sessions for Habitat — our new open source project that was announced on June 14th. Anyone building apps should attend these sessions for a deeper dive on Application Automation and to learn how Habitat improves your ability to build, deploy, and manage applications in the data center, the cloud, and in containers.
With ChefConf just a month away, be sure to encourage your team to register ASAP. Discount pricing is available for groups of 10 or more. Reach out to us for details.
Finally, here’s a video of me explaining DevOps on a farm. You might use it to help explain to your team why “you cannot DevOp alone” and why you shouldn’t attend ChefConf alone either.
