Conferences

If you’re a developer, DevOps Engineer, Operations Engineer, SRE, or anyone passionate about improving collaboration in tech, then DevOpsDays Chicago 2025 is the conference you don’t want to miss. Having attended DevOpsDays in 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2023 and even speaking in 2022 I can confidently say that this event is one of the best opportunities to grow your skills, connect with peers, and stay ahead of industry trends.

The DevOpsDays Experience DevOpsDays is not your typical tech conference. It blends expert-led talks with interactive Open Spaces that encourage deep discussions and real-world problem-solving. Unlike conferences that feel like one-way information dumps, DevOpsDays fosters a genuine community atmosphere where everyone’s voice matters. It’s a mix of structured learning, networking, and freeform discussions that you won’t find at many other industry events.

2023 DevOps Conference Speakers

I recently attended the 2023 DevOps Days Nashville conference in Tennessee, and it was an incredible experience. As with all DevOps Days conferences, the themes and speakers were decided by the local organizers, which made for a unique and diverse range of sessions.

On the first day of the conference, I attended some fantastic sessions that provided some great ideas that I can use with my clients. I particularly enjoyed the sessions on “How to launch a lifesaving platform,” “Converting the Automation Resistant,” “Stop Committing Your Secrets - Git Hooks To The Rescue!” and “Volunteering Your Skills with GeekCause.”

Richard Presenting LMAO Helps During Outages

In 2022, I had a fantastic year of reconnecting with my passions, meeting new individuals, delivering presentations, and gaining knowledge from experienced professionals. To conclude my travels and speaking engagements for the year, I had the privilege of journeying to Florida and delivering a talk at DevOps Days Tampa. Having attended DevOps conferences for many years, I was thrilled to create an engaging presentation that encouraged collaboration and prompted attendees to reflect on critical considerations when preparing for on-call duties.

I had the opportunity to attend another DevOps Days Chicago which is a regional conference focused on software development, IT infrastructure operations, and the intersection between them called DevOps. This was the fourth DevOps days I have attended, third in person, and first as a speaker. Speaking of which it’s good to be able to get back to a conference in person. I’m an extrovert so I love meeting new people and don’t get that really from virtual conferences. You’ll learn a lot, but I missed that one part when I was a Developer Advocate at Coyote are used to attend a lot of conferences and user group meetings, and 2020 kind of put a stop to that in many ways. It was great to see people in person. People I hadn’t seen in a long time like from a company I left 2 years ago or from local user groups and find out what they’re up to now and how their life has changed over the last few years. It was great meeting new and future business partners and hearing from the vendors about what makes their products different than others. Heck even one TACO product vendors gave away 100 bucks cash for looking at and testing their product in a demo environment.

Thanks for attending my talk on LMAO Helps During Outages at DevOps Days Birmingham 2022. As promised in the talk i wanted to share my slides for all. For those who missed my talk but stumbled across this post. My talk was about solving the problem of when your company has an outage but there is no need to sweat just remember to LMAO and you’ll get through it having a combination of logs, metrics, alerts, and an observability tool in place will help your company LOL through it.

This year I made the trip to San Francisco for Salesforce’s annual DreamForce a five day conference that trumps all other conference.  Every aspect of the event was amazing and WOW 120,000 attendees.  The leadership speaker series, the trainings, the networking opportunities, and the parties were all great. My highlights and most memorable moments were getting to meet a couple of vendors that I only get to speak with on the phone including one who is located in France. But it wouldn’t be a good DreamForce without good entertainment and SalesForce raises the bar in this aspect as well the opening Keynote featured Huey Lewis and The News followed by an evening concert with GreenDay and Blonde. One after party I attended had MC Hammer DJing it. As well 100’s of parties across the city. So many parties that a marketing company crested Partyforce a app to track all the parties happening throughout the week. It’s even got checkin functions and leaderboard. The speaker lineup this year focused on women in technology (WIT) and Marc Benioff the CEO of Salesforce had two amazing speakers join him for on stage discussions on Tuesday he was joined by CEO Marissa Mayer of Yahoo their conversation lasted for about hour and a half and focus on changing the focus and culture at Yahoo.  It was very insightful and I took away from it a lot.  One thing she said that I’ll remember is how she has stays organized with a never ending priority list. The other thing that stuck with me was a comment she made regarding work life balance stating she lived her life a Vince Lombardi quote “His priority is God, family, Packers” or something like that. The next night Marc was joined on stage for a discussion with another amazing leader in the technology industry Sheryl Sandberg the CEO of Facebook.  Sheryl has recently released a new book called Lean In which all attendees received a free copy of.  In the book she talks about closing the gap on gender diversity. It was quite interesting conversation her and Marc had the take away from their fireside was being more conscious of my communication with female coworkers…..I guess. Over the next few weeks I’ll read her book Lean In and maybe I’ll rewrite a couple of post about it and my thoughts regarding. All my crazy pictures from the week long adventure can be seen at https://plus.google.com/photos/105588147711118968857/albums/5951051845514062977?authkey=CM7cnL-j1I_GMw