DevOpsDays Antwerp Recap

My review of the 15 Year Anniversary!

DevOpsDays Ghent 2014 - the 5th anniversary of DevOpsDays - was my first big-room talk 10 years ago, and the start of my wild, incredible ride with the DevOps community. So, of course, I had to go back for the 15-year Anniversary.

I never imagined I’d get to keynote the event!

10 years ago, the event was about the future of DevOps, and I gave my talk “DevOps is a MacGuffin” to highlight that DevOps is just a means to an end - effectively a plot device - that had already served a purpose in bringing folks together and driving the story forward.

10 years later, my focus on the future of not just DevOps but all of business is thinking about flow across large organizations. Working through Flow Engineering with my clients and talking to others has revealed a gap in how we understand, diagnose, and design flow in large organizations, especially those with legacy business-and-tech separation.

My talk summarizes the paper I co-wrote with Cisco’s John Rauser about applying digital network concepts and principles to organizational networks of teams and collaboration. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, or the paper!

There were a ton of excellent talks at the event. I had to juggle a few obligations and had a few excellent hallway track conversations that forced me to miss a few, but it was a great program of current-day challenges and experience reports.

DevOps Days Antwerp 2024

A few highlights stand out:

• Absolute #1: Catching up with folks I haven’t seen since I was last in Belgium 10 years ago, and folks who travelled in from all over to attend this milestone event. Hands down, the very best part of conferences.

• Manuel Pais emphasizing the key elements of fast flow.

• Dirk Lehmann sharing his continued journey at SAP scale.

• Doses of DORA reality with a 10 year recap by Nathan Harvey and sobering context by Michael Coté.

• Mandi Walls opening my eyes to Occupational Culture [the culture across specialties that bridges silos and is sometimes stronger than org culture].

• An excellent book recommendation list, and interesting open spaces [day 1 had deep dives into Value Stream Mapping and Wardley Mapping]

• John Willis ran the classic Deming red bead experiment to show how common workplace management practices often fail to address the real causes of performance issues.

• We also had a day 0 global organizer event which was a great reason to catch up with folks who’ve been a part of making DevOpsDays happen for the past 15 years.

Despite a very busy few days and some serious jet lag, I even got a chance to wander around a bit on my last night and catch a bit of Antwerp, which has a beautiful night time vibe.

I’m very happy to be heading home, and I have been dreading the collision of all the events I’m a part of this conference season, but I wouldn’t trade it for less chaos. It’s been an incredible privilege to be a part of these events, and I hope to be back again at the next big celebration!

---