DevOpsDays conferences are completely self-organized. The focus of these conferences isn’t to capture leads or sell your business, aside from the sponsorships that are allowed quick presentations in-between talks during the event.

The 10th-anniversary of DevOpsDays was celebrated at the 2019 Ghent event, with more than 400 attendees from over 50 different cities around the world.

What makes DevOpsDays valuable?

1. The conference in Ghent was focused on cultural transformation and DevOps as a cultural movement in organizations, rather than just a role or a team.

2. After speaking with many of the attendees from different parts of the world, it’s clear that everybody needs to embrace DevOps as a part of their culture. All of the current problems that many are facing could be avoided if the teams had better communication. There are also companies that rely on legacy software that only a handful of people understand, and not sharing that knowledge puts the future of that company at risk.

In order to modernize the applications and digitally transform every company, the mindset must be aligned towards communication, collaboration, and effectiveness. This can all be achieved by creating high-performance organizations, however, the transformation must be from within to be effective.

– Leon Garcia, Director of Engineering

What were some of the highlights and what can attendees expect at DevOpsDays Guadalajara?

1. DevOpsDays are community-driven, and the event provides spaces for the local community to discuss ideas and practices as a group. This helps the local community grow while benefiting the ecosystem.

2. The main focus of the event was DevOps as a culture and the importance of how DevOps is achieved as team and company practices with tools to support the practices.

3. In the community, there are misconceptions about what DevOps is and what it is not. At the DevOpsDays Ghent, a few talks touched on how having a DevOps role or team, buying a tool, or automating once, without modifying the automation in the future, are not what defines DevOps.

 – Esteban Castaño, Site Reliability Engineer, DevOps enthusiast

What can you tell us about DevOpsDays Guadalajara planning?

It’s demanding but proactive.

I’m part of the group organizing the event coming to Guadalajara in 2020. What I immediately noticed is that the community organizing welcomes the collaboration, but under their terms with a lot of very specific requirements to organize it.

At first sight, this can sound picky, but after being at the zero-day event talking with members of the core team I realized that all those requirements have been the reason why the community has evolved in such a great way.

Everything is oriented to help the DevOps community maintain control of the events and maintain the spirit of generating a positive impact on the community while focusing on cultural change.

The venue, food, sponsors; everything complements the collaboration space between members that come to the event.

It has been ten years since the first event, the community has had massive growth, learned lots of lessons, and found ways to support DevOps communities from around the world.

Culture over technologies

One of the biggest parts of the events in DevOps is automation but if you have problems you will have automated problems.

It’s very interesting how the talks are oriented to generate a change in the mindset of the attendees, showing us how to face different problems but from a cultural perspective instead of a technical one.

Open spaces

The main differentiator with other events I have been to is the open spaces.

This activity implemented since the first DevOpsDays is the most important part of the event. The attendees suggest topics to discuss and divide into involuntary small groups to start discussing the topic or problem and looking for conclusions or answers.

It also has a very interesting element called law of mobility where you are allowed to get out of the conversation and find a new topic. This shows how open and collaborative the community can be, and is an excellent activity to learn something new and share experiences.

– Clemente Estrada, Site Reliability Engineer, DevOps enthusiast

What do YOU want to see at DevOpsDays Guadalajara?

We want you to be a part of our DevOpsDays in 2020! DevOpsDays is organized by the community and Wizeline is part of this effort.

Submit a talk here. We invite you to participate in topics on:

• Serverless
• Health, stress, and burnout
• Organization/delivery culture
• Test design and automated testing
• DevOps in the enterprise
• …and more!

For a better experience and higher chances of being selected, we recommend:

Talks about tools to be at the conceptual level
A draft describing what the talk will be about
Explain how your proposal is interesting to the DevOps community
What will people take away/learn from the talk

Reach out to the DevOpsDays organizing team at guadalajara@devopsdays.org for more information.