Aaron Aldrich

A lot has happened in the past 10 years (give or take) of DevOps. What started as a single tech conference in Belgium became 80 worldwide events in 2019 and persists throughout a global pandemic as online gatherings. And while the tech du jour of these events has shifted over time —conferences full of talks and open spaces on jenkins pipelines give way to docker and now to kubernetes talk— we’re still talking about how best to learn from incidents, or how to foster psycological safety. Everything we’re still discussing is about growing as people and building strong teams and communities.

This is a talk that draws on my personal experiences in the DevOps community and through the pandemic to show how regardless of the technologies we’re using, our communities and practice developed under the DevOps banner are far more important than any specific technology we’ve worked with. It’ll touch on how the most important talk I’ve ever given was about being vulnerable in public about my mental health, how the people (and not any technology) I’ve met in DevOps have helped me the most through this global pandemic, and how building strong communities is the most important “yak shaving” we can do.

The real evergreen DevOps is people.