Let's Get Back to Fundamentals @ DevOpsDays Tel Aviv

DevOpsDays Tel Aviv is coming back for its 7th time running, December 18-19th (you’re seeing correctly...same dates as last year, we like to keep it simple) - and after this many years, instead of sinking into our comfort zone and letting things just move ahead with their typical inertia, we decided to STOP, and do a HARD RESET.

One of the hardest things to do when building strong communities is deliver consistently good content, that caters to a diversity of technology proficiency, while enabling new voices, and not becoming overly fluffy or simplistic.

While the DevOpsDays format has served us well for the past 7 events, we decided to rethink the value we provide the community, since we don't take for granted that being able to attend conferences - whether one or two days is a commitment, and we want to make it worth the community’s time to attend.

And then...

I stumbled upon this Tweet by Jason Dixon (who kickstarted the Monitorama community), and it really resonated. It kickstarted a discussion with the DevOpsDays team.

Particularly this response:

We do think there’s something we can do about it.  

DevOpsDays Tel Aviv has decided to take us back to fundamentals, and really focus on the technology backbones of the services we consume regularly. 

While abstraction is an excellent thing for velocity and getting sh* done - it has the tradeoff of hiding the underlying complexity, and these patterns of high level abstractions have taken us from a world of technology as craft, to just rolling out products and services without really understanding what’s happening under the hood.  

That's why this year's agenda has the sole purpose and focus of making us better engineers - both on the operational and development sides. We are aiming to provide content that will improve the basic foundations, ideas, and concepts we rely on when building systems.

Another thing that has been an ongoing sentiment that we’ve been hearing from the community at large, is that content at events always caters to the lowest common denominator. 

To combat this we have decided to provide a diversity of session types - short talks that provide quick technology overviews, longer sessions to cater to advanced topics, as well as providing a more comprehensive hands-on workshop experience. We realized that short workshops provide very little value from a hands-on perspective, and wanted to enable those who have come to learn to truly be able to do so.

So this year we encourage you to submit talks that cater to a diversity of profiles:

• Fundamentals and 101s - for those still learning
• Advanced sessions - for those looking to go deep
• Full-day comprehensive masterclasses - for those who want a hands-on experience
• Ignites - for those who want to have fun

As always the staple of DevOpsDays, open spaces, the opportunity to sit and hash out a topic with your peers will also be improved. Stay tuned for surveys to get your input on what to highlight at the event.

Call for papers is open until August 31st, and we’d love to see the entire spectrum of talks and learning experiences covered in our upcoming event.

(If you're interested in sponsorship opportunities, you can find those here.)