Just like last year, after Velocity, I attended DevOpsDays in Mountain View, now at its second edition. Many people that were in town for Velocity spent at least one extra day for DevOpsDays, but also many people from the area that for some reason could not attend Velocity came to LinkedIn HQ for this event; about 200-250 people I would say. Even if the same type of people were at both events (awesome dev/ops), because of the completely different way they are organized they didn’t overlap at all. As you will see bellow in my impressions DevOpsDays wins largely in most of the areas:

• first of all it is a free event (compared with a regular O’Reilly conference where prices usually start at $1k).
• it is much more interactive: while Velocity is a classic conference where you normally have a presenter showing off something (hopefully not selling or hiring), and maybe some questions at the end, DevOpsDays is more like an open discussion, with people either on a panel or open spaces.
• the food was way better at DevOpsDays, no question about it. And the ice cream on Saturday added an extra special touch .

The first day, Friday, started with the “Devops State of the Union” by John Willis. This was a very good introduction on what DevOps means and a look back on what happened during the past couple of years, especially considering the fact that many people where there for the first time. For example I met someone from Microsoft that was sent here to find out “what is this devops thing” and how they can use it, and this just shows what a huge progress the devops movement has made in such a short amount of time, and how many people are now interested in the movement. (in this particular case I’m not sure he returned at Microsoft with something useful, but just the fact that they are interested in this demonstrates my point).

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I attended Velocity 2011 in Santa Clara, CA; this was the 4th edition of Velocity and my 2nd one. This means that even if I was still very much impressed with everything what happened during these 3 days, it was not quite so mind blowing like last year, and you will be able to see this from my impressions bellow.

First impression was that this was much bigger than last year, and the numbers just released by O’Reilly demonstrate it was almost double with about 2,000 participants and another sell out (compared with 1,200 in 2010). Considering the high price of the conference (~1k) this is very impressive and interesting to see how they will host next year even more people. From a question a speaker had many people where at their first Velocity, but even so I met many friends and people I met last year. From the content point of view there was a lot of focus on mobile performance that I haven’t seen last year. Myself I mostly followed the operations track, and only a few talks in the performance track.

Read the rest of this entry »