Operability 2015 was the best DevOps conference I have ever been to. Perhaps the best tech conference full stop, and i only made it for one day out of two. Operability was great because it wasn’t about tech, exactly, but rather all the human aspects of how and why we keep systems running in a way that makes users feel good about them. It’s fashionable to talk about empathy in tech right now, but Operable made that a simple matter of practice.
Scott Klein, cofounder of StatusPage, recently acquired by Atlassian, started his talk with some mindful breathing exercises. No seriously – and a largely British audience responded with hardly a chuckle. After some breathing Klei laid down some science about how to communicate the status of your service. It was a great talk – we learned about the value of post mortems, with plenty of best practices for dealing with that outage you really wish didn’t happen.
Empathy, psychology, humanity – that’s what’s important in systems and operations management.
Think about Twitter and the fact we celebrated the Fail Whale. People literally have tattoos celebrating Twitter downtime. Human psychology is not simple when it comes to making allowances for services that we rely on and or just love.
Today, curator Marco Abis said some nice things about our internet of things conference ThingMonk
“it’s simply the only event in London you will find where you can interact directly with the people making the scene.”,
He also made a request for proposals. If you’re involved in managing IoT systems and you’re clueful about human factors you should definitely send a proposal to talk at Operability 2016.
One area I think will be critical to managing IoT, and managing systems more generally, is the bot revolution – at ThingMonk over the last couple of years the strongest emergent theme has been Conversational IoT. Machines talking to people talking to machines.
So Like Cog built by Operable (not to be confused with Operability conf) in ops. While mentioning Operable I should say that Mark Imbriaco, Operable founder and “father of chatops” will be speaking at Operability. He will be worth the price of admission alone, and it’s a very very good lineup again this year. I think I have a few discount codes for Marco’s conference – please comment here if you’d like one.
Bots and command lines is only part of the story in conversational Iot and ops however – voice systems is definitely going to be a very big thing. We’ll have Alexas to hack, a workshop on how to do so, and some giveaways at Thingmonk September 12-14.
I would respectfully suggest you come to both conferences.
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