This year I finally was able to attend the 3rd DevOpsDays in Hometown Cape Town (Woodstock). As the name suggests, DevOpsDays is a conference about all DevO(o)psie things over two days (20-21 Sept 2018) in Cape Town. Since I was speaker (tricked by Kyle 😜), it was more of an 2.5 days event, which is why I am quite happy it ended into a long weekend.
First, lets give the event some love:
Then, just as important, big/huge thanks and shoutout to this years organisers:
- Adrian M.
- Cobus B.
- Tom B. (who apparently re-located to the UK, which is why we did not see him this year?)
Additionally there were quite some volunteers who did an amazing Job. I unfortunately completely forgot to introduce myself properly – bad me / apologies – but I do hope they are all being credited here. Eugene was at least quite prominent there – so huge thanks to him.
Both days are available to watch via YouTube – and as to my understanding there will be still some final editing done to be able to watch every talk separately.
DevOpsDays Cape Town 2018 – Day 1 – Full Video
DevOpsDays Cape Town 2018 – Day 2 – Full Video
My talk: Serverless with Google App Engine (or how I delivered 15M page views for only 10 USD)
If you are interested in my talk, I uploaded my slides on to SlideShare (does that make me old-school? What do the new-kids of the block do nowadays??).
Some words to the event itself
It was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G! Very well organised, great talks, great people. If you were a speaker the conference started already a night before (19th of Sept) with the speakers dinner at The Wild Fig.
It was my first time at the DoubleTree Hotel in Woodstock – so entering it felt more like going into a Mall, with some shops, a small Restaurant and even a corner shop. Some arrows or banners would have been great here. It was also not really clear to me that the actual conference rooms were on the second floor.
There were two foreign speakers, one from Facebook, Marek D, about Monitoring – which resonated very much with my mentality (avoid noise + only actionable alerts) and Joe N. from Portland with a very very nice Keynote.
There were some great toys from awesome Sponsors, which I shamelessly bagged in for my Kids (also this is most probably the only picture I have from the event 😅):
Networking
In between the talks, and latest at the “Afterparty” at The Woodstock Lounge one had the opportunity to connect. The Afterparty was in a great location with free beer & food. It was completely reserved for DevOps Days and lots of AWSome chats happening in the inside and outside area.
Shoutouts to some of the amazing people I (re-)met:
- The Hermanus Gang (aka “Her-Gang”): Erwee, Kyle, Hunter (am I missing anyone? 🤔)
- Graeme: Hilarious guy, when he speaks its always worth listening / And he had a great talk as well!
- Jared L.: Works on the most exciting stack I have ever heard: completely serverless via AWS Lambda 🤤
- Karl F.: He just oozes so much hilarity and fun – his talk was my personal highlight
- Finally in Person: Wogan M., Jarrett J.
- The usual suspects
- Team ProdigyFinance: Ross, Madeline & Ash
- And some many others I gave a fist-bump 🙂
Conclusion
As Adrian said nicely in the closing session: DevOpsDays feels like a family reunion. The talks are a great reminder in what boat we are all in together. But the chats in the hallway or the chats at the “Afterparty” is where you really should put your money at.
If you are new to all of this but would like to get started & involved, I highly recommend joining the Cape Town DevOps Meetup and our beloved ZATech Slack Chat. See you all next year 👋!
