Free DevOps: Hatched in Response to COVID-19

I’ve now been working from home for 30 days since Maryland closed our public schools and advised its citizens distance themselves.  It was also 30 days ago that we had nearly 1,000 executives and managers at State Farm preparing to receive a small group of All Day DevOps speakers for a special on-site conference on their campus. With lockdowns and travel restrictions being enforced across companies and countries, we made the right decision to postpone that event to a later date.

Within hours or days – it all blurs now – other conferences that I was speaking at in the Spring like O’Reilly’s Software Architecture Summit and Devopsdays SLC were pulled off the map, or postponed.  For many of my friends across the industry who speak occasionally or regularly at conferences, their travel was grinding to a halt too. Their roles as evangelists, advocates, thought leaders, and educators were impacted abruptly.  They were all grounded.

I knew at that point, we could pull something off to help those friends and continue to serve the DevOps community around the world.  For the past five years, we’ve assembled All Day DevOps as a free, online, 24 hour, 150 speaker, no vendor pitch experience. We’ve done it with help from the community.  We know how to organize it. We know how to produce it. And we know how to gather thousands of people for a great experience. Even though All Day DevOps has been an annual thing, three weeks ago we introduced a special “Spring Break Edition” that will kick off this Friday, April 17th.

Normally, All Day DevOps has a nine month planning cycle, but the Spring Break Edition nor COVID-19 afforded us that luxury.  We would normally have a CFP open to all, but with (Read more...)