Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Good morning. Welcome back to the first live DevOps Enterprise Summit in three years. I am so grateful that society has started returning to some semblance of normalcy, and that we're able to do this conference in real life again. So this is our 15th DevOps Enterprise Summit, with the last five being in the virtual format made necessary because of the global pandemic, and we have put together an amazing three days for this live event. And I really think it could be some of our best program we've ever put together.

So what I'd like to do with you is share with you four things in this initial segment. One is share with you the history of the conference and its goals; share with you some of the structural elements of what composes this conference; the community norms and the notion of scenius; and specific design choices we've made for this first live event that we [haven't had] in way too long.

So first, the first DevOps Enterprise Summit was in 2014. And essentially we stated with the statement that we believe DevOps is important. We believe that DevOps creates genuine value. We believe that DevOps makes technology work humane, as my friend John Smart says: better value sooner, safer, and happier. And I've come to now believe that DevOps helps unleash everyone's full creativity and problem-solving potential, versus suppressing them or even extinguishing it entirely, as depicted in The Phoenix Project.

So I mentioned this is the 15th conference, and we've had 977 talks, nearly 1,500 speakers, and over 500 companies represented. And so this is something that I was able to do for fun, actually: to count the number of conferences. These are all the organizations who presented from large, complex organizations spanning almost every industry vertical. And by the way, my goal is to post the source code for all of this that uses the video library data in GitHub. And I've also made a claim, but for the first time was able to actually prove that as the years go by, not only have we had so many industries represented, but the people who are presenting are more senior.

And so this was a feeling based on looking at the programming, going through the acceptance process, the schedules, but this is actually something that we were able to prove by again going through the video library data. So this graph, again written in Clojure, taught to me by my friend Mike Nygard, shows this. And so really what you should see here is that the number of people speaking at the highest levels, from both the management track as well as the individual contributor track, keeps growing. And so of course, it's not just about titles. We need leaders at all levels. But to me, it shows that the work that we're doing within this community matters to people who matter.

So I think one of the indications of this is that speakers are now starting to feature videos from their CEOs in their talks. So we had one from American Airlines in 2020, from eBay last year, and Virgin Media early this year. And so the reason why I think this is so important is that for the last eight years one of the top obstacles verbalized by the community is, how do I get business leadership on board? And so what I'm hoping and what I feel so strongly about is that by having talks that show that the work that you're doing in this community matters to people who matter, we can get increasingly recalcitrant, skeptical business leadership on board, because these success stories are being told by people they listen to, describing how the work that you're doing is actually important, as opposed to technology being delegated away to very distant parts of the organization.

So the next thing I want to share with you is just the structure of this conference. And by the way, can I get the slide next showing also on the downscreen monitor? So this conference is really made up of two types of talks. The first one is experience reports. And so experience reports that started in 2014 are almost always the same. They follow this format: here's the organization that I work in, and here's the industry we compete in, here's where I fit in the organization, here's a business problem that we set out to solve, here's where we started and why, here's what we did including describing the tools and techniques that we used, here were the outcomes, and here's the help that we're looking for, or the problems that still remain.

And the reason why this is important is I think this actually is very close to the scientific method that says, here's what we think is going to happen, here's what we did, here's the outcomes that happened to prove or disprove the hypothesis. And so this is opposed to experts, in quotes, talking from stage saying about what they think you should do because they think it might work. Instead, what we really want are proof, and we learn from watching other people see how they solve problems.

So this year, this is a sampling, or maybe a complete population, of experience reports that you'll see over the next three days. And so one of the interesting things about this conference is that we also have repeat experience reports, because we want to see, how are they doing? Did it work? Did they get fired? And is this guidance that we actually don't want to follow? So this year we actually have more repeat experience reports than usual because we want to have a reunion in the DevOps Enterprise community after three years of being able to see each other only in video. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later.

So experience reports are one type of talk. The other talk that you'll see here are expert talks. And so it is one of the things I'm just so proud of, that over the years these are some of the people that we've been able to have teach us things that we think are important to get us from here to there. And so I think it's also interesting, many of these people have PhDs. It's just showing that they have an expertise that we think is relevant to help us achieve our goals. And by the way, not all of them are PhDs. One of my favorite experience reports happened on the stage in 2019, and that was the Big Four audit panel. It was a myth-busting session because one of the top obstacles that you stated was, you know, that the people who don't want DevOps to happen are security people and external auditors and regulators. And here they were able to show us that they believe that DevOps is not only possible to do in an auditable, secure, and compliant way, but they view it as necessary because they want their clients to still be around in 10 years.

So this year we have an amazing set of experts again, with expertise that we think is important for us to achieve our goals.

So next thing I want to briefly discuss is the notion of scenius, and maybe to share why I think that's so important. Let me describe what DevOps Enterprise 2014 felt like. So for those of you who were there, it was one year after The Phoenix Project came out and almost all of the talks were experience reports. And here were my observations. One is that there was an incredible universality to the problems that were being described across large, complex organizations, regardless of industry vertical, regardless of how long the organization has been around. And there was a feeling that there was something genuinely exciting and momentous afoot. And what I learned over the years is that this is a community that genuinely loves helping each other. And over the years, I actually found there's this word that describes those type of dynamics.

And this is Brian Eno, the famous musician and record producer known for reinventing the sounds of bands like U2, Devo, Talking Heads, and more. But he coined this word, scenius, and I'm just going to read this. Despite heroic mythology, lone geniuses do not drive most scientific, cultural, or policy advances. Breakthroughs typically emerge from a scene, an exceptionally productive community of practice that develops novel epistemic norms, which means ways of thinking. A major invention may take a genius, but the genius is created in part by a scenius.

And so scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is a communal form of the concept of genius. And he goes on to say, individuals immersed in a scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you will act like a genius. Your like-minded peers and the entire environment inspire you. I felt like that just so beautifully described what was happening within this community.

So he goes on to say, what are the other three key features of scenius? One, mutual appreciation: risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety appreciated, friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure. And when I think about this community, this is where novel techniques develop and quickly spread. In fact, I think that's the next one: rapid exchange of tools and techniques. As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside of a common language and sensibility. So things like the DevOps Dojo, things like so many other, even the State of DevOps research, all those I think are examples of how tools are picked up and spread.

And third: network effects of success. When a record is broken, a hit happens, a breakthrough erupts, the entire success is claimed by the entire scene, empowering the scene to further success. And I think that is absolutely something we see within this community. I think, again, the increasing seniority of people who care about the things that we are working on is just one example of the network effects of success.

So what is this problem that we're trying to solve? And I think it is because this technology function is so misunderstood by senior business leaders and is often over-delegated to quote technology leaders instead. I think our goal is that everyone knows that amazing business outcomes are created when it is co-created between business and technology, and when it's integrated to all aspects of strategy and operations. But I'm going to take a quick pause here. How am I doing here so far?

Okay, awesome. Okay. So the last thing I want to share is sort of the design objectives and my personal goals for this particular conference. And so I will start by just sharing how important conferences have been for me. So in the beginning of the pandemic, when we were trying to figure out how do you run a virtual conference, I wrote this blog post called My Love Letter to Conferences, really to clarify my own thinking about what made conferences so worthwhile to me and what is it about how conferences are structured that enable that outcome. And so what I learned is that I feel like I owe my entire career to conferences. It's there where I learned what I need to learn, it's there where I met the people I need to meet, and this is where I met my favorite collaborators going back for over a decade. And some of that was just so evident just by going through these photos. So many of the people that we recognize within this community, I met at a conference. All the people in the program community I get to work with, I met at a conference.

And so what are we trying to do in this very special conference, the first time we've convened as a group in person in three years? Here is what we came up with. Let's create a reunion party for the DevOps Enterprise community because we deserve it. Two is, allow us to meet in real life all the amazing people we met during the pandemic. And three, of course, discover more amazing work from incredible new technology leaders to this community.

So what is different this time? We're going to have more plenary sessions than we've ever done. I actually have grown to fall in love with this 15-minute miniature format that we did a couple of times in the virtual format. We're going to try it out here. And so all the plenary sessions are shrinking. They used to be 30 minutes, and now they're 20, sometimes 15 minutes.

Two is we want to bring back very specifically some of those fun and high-learning in-real-life elements from conferences, things like lightning talks, things like Ask the Experts, where we get to meet the people that you admire, that we learn so much from. And we're experimenting with bringing back the Slack interaction model to the live event. One of the things I thought was magical about the virtual conferences was we routinely had over 10,000 Slack messages per day, and as my friend Nick Christensen would say, it's because it creates the transactional cost of each transaction is so low. You just had a lot of them, right? It was so easy to find the people you want to interact with. And so we're experimenting with ways to try to bring this back to live conferences.

So the general session, the plenary sessions like this, remains almost all the same. Our goals are really to share success stories that we celebrate as a community, that inspire us, that elevate the bar for what we think is possible; set the language and norms and model them; and then bring in experts that we think are so useful, whose skills we need to get us from here to there. And again, let's try to bring Slack into that element. And then the breakout sessions, or the track talks, that is where the dungeon master does not control the game. That's where you control the game. And again, we want to make it as easy as possible for you to connect with the people within this conference.

But I'll just state our goal is to try to have all of the breakout talks posted and available to you within 48 hours. So cross your fingers, wish us luck. But it's not about talks, really. As my friend Jeffrey Fredrick said, conferences are really for conferring. So if I could just put out to you my fondest and most sincere wishes for what's going to happen in the next three days, it is that this is a successful conference on two dimensions. One is high learning, meaning that, for me, I learn a ton of new things that I value and appreciate. And then the other dimension is high networking. You get to meet the people that you admire who are doing amazing things.

And so I'm hoping that, we wrote down what we wanted you to feel at the end of the event: exhilaration from hanging out with kindred spirits and fellow travelers, reconnecting with friends and more people, and meeting new people; being part of a community with shared goals who all love sharing and helping others succeed; the feeling of learning from the best in the game and walking away with a ton of things to read, things you feel like you need to learn because they're important; and again, broadening your circle of friends and potential collaborators for potentially decades to come.

So with that, I think I had some notes. So before I turn it over to Jeff, he's responsible for keeping the trains running on time and helping make sure that everyone gets to where they need to go. He will be presenting the user's manual for this conference. I think that's what I had to present for today. With that, Jeff.

Jeff Gallimore

Oh, whoa. Hey. Hey Shane. Yeah, user's manual, huh? I don't think I've heard that one before. All right. Who can tell me what this number represents? And some of you may be thinking right now, Jeff, I was told that there were going to be no tests at this conference. It's not a test. Just shout it out. Who's got a thought? Mega Millions? It's not the Mega Millions number. It's really hard to hear up here. Come on, shout it out. Some good guesses, some good guesses for sure. But let me tell you what this number actually represents.

It's the number of minutes since we were last in person at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, three years ago, October 30th, 2019. And we have been counting every single one of them to get this community back together again for this moment. And we are back in person.

And we have an amazing experience. Gene highlighted a lot of the things that we have in store for you. Something that is special and unique about this conference: we're going to find and create opportunities for you to interact with the speakers, something that other conferences have, that velvet rope between the attendees and the speakers. We're going to get rid of that, and we're also going to create a lot of opportunities for you all to connect with each other and have those serendipitous moments that we all know and love, and that is a part of that Summit experience.

But it has been a while since we've all been together in person. So if we've forgotten how to people a little bit, let me just do a refresh on some of those things that can happen in person again. You can put your arm around somebody. You can have a hug. We can hear the sweet, sweet sound of crowd applause for real, not through a webinar or a Zoom thing window. You can actually shake somebody's hand in person. You can have a hallway track conversation in an actual hallway. You can get your actual physical book signed by an actual physical author with an actual signature. You can exchange business cards. Remember those? Remember those from the before times, business cards? You can clink your drinks at a happy hour. And you can get your picture taken with a Summit speaker, just like the one that's in the top-right corner there with Gene. And Gene, look how happy Gene is to have his picture taken with that Summit speaker. Yeah, you got a joke, didn't you? All right.

But COVID is still reality for us, unfortunately. If you'll notice, we've got hand sanitizer stations throughout the venue. Use those. We also gave every attendee a box of COVID tests. In the unfortunate event that somebody pops positive for that, please reach out to us. We're going to do everything we can to take care of it. And then you may also notice red ribbons on certain badges. Those are signals to us that that person wants a little bit more space. So if you do see the red ribbon, please respect that.

Gene already hit some of the stuff that we've learned over the course of the last three years in running virtual conferences, and we're going to try and integrate the best of being in person with the best of the virtual. And the thing that he called out mostly was in Slack. So we have that. You should definitely get onboarded into Slack. This is the URL we're going to have available just a little bit later here, too.

And here are the various Slack channels. I've already seen some messages in Slack identifying what those Slack channels are. If you take away nothing else from this slide, pay attention to Summit info. That's going to get you every information that you need and everywhere you need to go during the conference. We'd also appreciate if you could update your Slack profile: add your name, your organization, a picture, title, pronouns, whatever it is that you want to share with this community to help us get to know you better. And it'll make your experience and everybody else's experience better, too.

I mentioned engaging with speakers earlier and getting rid of that velvet rope. So we're going to have a lot of opportunities to be able to do that, including taking your picture with them. You can also interact with the speakers in Slack. We've got Slack discussion channels set up for each of the rooms in the venue. So where all the tracks are happening, whatever room that you're sitting in, if you want to comment in Slack, please go ahead and do that. If you are going to use Slack, please mute your sounds. The clickety-clickety and the Slack notifications that are going to be sitting there in the room may be great for you, maybe not so much for the other attendees that are near you. And also be kind in Slack. Alert fatigue is a real thing. Don't use that here. Don't use that channel.

All right. We also have networking time set aside each day. It's dedicated for us to connect with each other. We have multiple opportunities to be able to do that. The first one is going to be learning sprints. And this is where you can get together with some of the IT Revolution authors. They're going to be sharing the things that they've included in a lot of their books. It's a really fast-paced way to learn a bunch of stuff. TL;DR on this is: you're going to learn new stuff fast.

We also have Birds of a Feather. This is something that we've done in person. We've also done virtually. We're keeping it here. We're going to have four standard Birds of a Feather topics each day. That's going to be in the Harman hallway. My bearings: upstairs and out to the left. And we're also going to have special Birds of a Feather sessions each day. We'll announce what those are on the day of the event.

If you've been to other events, you may be familiar with the law of mobility. Law of mobility says if you find yourself in a place where you're either learning or contributing, then you should respectfully navigate to a place where you can. Short story on this one: it's okay to leave and go somewhere else if you want to do that.

We also have a code of conduct. We're all part of the same community here, the DevOps Enterprise community. We're also all human beings, and we should treat each other well. We have a code of conduct that reflects that. You can read that in the Slack Summit info channel. But let me give you the basic gist of it. Listen well when somebody else is sharing. Share well when you have something to say. Respect everyone at all times. And speak up if you hear something or see something that is not consistent with the kind of environment we want for this community. Okay, so if you're on board with that, can you give me some sort of visual indication? A wave, a thumbs up, a high thought, jazz hands if you're up for that. Okay, fantastic. I see that unanimous, so we're all good.

All right. Some thank-yous real quick. I want to shout out to IT Revolution. This conference wouldn't be possible without all of the work and the people and the leadership from IT Revolution. They are the company that brings us the books that are on our bookshelf that are favorites: The Phoenix Project, The Unicorn Project, The DevOps Handbook, Accelerate, and a whole slew of other ones. Thank you to IT Revolution.

We also want to give a big thank-you to our premier sponsor, LaunchDarkly. You will see them all over. Again, they are really important part of putting on this event. So if we could give them a plus-two. Thank you to all of our platinum sponsors. You can do that too. Yeah, that's good. And thank you to our golds one more time.

And then we've got a couple of special sponsors, one for the lightning talks. We're going to handle that tomorrow night. And then also our Wi-Fi. We've got the information for the Wi-Fi in the Slack channel, and we've also had some, I think, some issues with the Wi-Fi this morning, so we're still working those out. We're going to get that stabilized. It's all going to be great. It is not Comcast's fault. They are fantastic, okay. Yes.

All right. Another opportunity for you: stop by the LaunchDarkly booth. You can pick up your copy of the latest version of the DevOps Enterprise Journal. This is a collection of white papers that are curated by the best in the business, part of our community, the leading-edge thinkers and doers. It's great material. Stop by the LaunchDarkly booth and pick up your copy. And where is that LaunchDarkly booth? It's in the expo hall. We have an expo hall that is upstairs and in the Belmont Ballroom. We have hours open each of the three days. Stop by each of the sponsors and have a conversation with them, and while you're there play the sponsor passport game.

If you're talking to them, you've got it. Everybody should have a sponsor passport badge. It's got all the sponsors listed who are participating in that. Get your card stamped at each of those sponsors who are participating. Really, really important: write your name when you get that passport completed. You don't want to be the person that wins who didn't put their name on it. It's happened before. Public service announcement to all of you. Okay, drop it off in the LaunchDarkly booth before 1 p.m. on Thursday, and then show up for the drawing that's going to happen right after that.

A really big thank-you to all of our sponsors. They are such an important part of this community, and they are here because they are wanting to help us with our DevOps journeys.

Real quick, Wi-Fi information. This is it if you haven't been able to get that yet. I see cameras coming out. You can take a picture of this. Here's the Slack onboarding link and the Wi-Fi information. All right, and while you still have your cameras out, take a picture of this QR code. Hopefully this is blown up enough so that you can actually get to it.

So while you're doing that, let me tell you what this is all about. The theme of the party tonight is reunion, getting everybody back together. So we're going to have some awards, and those awards are going to be determined by your voting: who's most likely to. So pick, make your choices, cast your votes for the speakers that are most likely to write the next IT Revolution book or break down silos head-first. I have my opinions about that one.

Okay, final thing. If you need help or you have questions about anything at the conference, post it in Summit help. That's one of the Slack channels that we have. You can also email help@itrevolution.com. You can find a member of the IT Revolution staff. They'll have black rims on their badges that will say staff. And if all else fails, you can direct message me, Jeff Gallimore, in Slack.

Okay, that's it. I'm going to hand it back off to Gene. Have an amazing time at the Summit.