DevOpsDays Tampa Bay 2024 took place last Thursday, September 19th, and I’m pleased to report that it was a success, with 230 attendees, great talks, an enthusiastic audience, and a lot of participation, all in my favorite conference venue!
DevOpsDays is a worldwide series of community-run technical conferences covering topics of software development, IT infrastructure operations, and the intersection between them.
DevOpsDays Tampa Bay is “The Other Bay Area’s” edition of DevOpsDays, organized, produced, and executed by volunteers from Tampa Bay and beyond, for the benefit of the tech scene here on “The Other West Coast.”
Here are my photos from the event…
Andrew Clay Shafer opened the conference with his keynote, The Ghost of DevOps Past…
…which was followed by PJ Hagerty’s presentation, DevOps — Philosophy vs. Practice. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any photos of his talk, as I was getting ready to give my talk, Python Meets DevOps!
I was followed by Aman Sharma’s presentation on what he termed “GenOps” — in other words, DevOps for Generative AI applications:
After Aman was Omer Farooq, who gave his talk, Modernized Approach to Container DevSecOp through Software Development Lifecycle.
And then: lunch!
One of the best things about last year’s and this year’s DevOpsDays Tampa Bay was that they took place at Armature Works. It’s not just a great conference venue, but also a great place to eat!
Rather than feed us standard-issue tech conference food, we were each given a $25 coupon redeemable at any of the food vendors.
I decided to try out a new-to-me place, Bap Bap and selected their Korean fried chicken and kimchi fries. I definitely would order it again:
Immediately after lunch was Micahel Levan’s presentation, Production-Ready Platform Engineering: From Conception To Build To FAIL, followed by Gwyneth Allwright’s Escaping the Legacy Infrastructure Labyrinth:
Next up was Al Rodriguez, with DevOps Like a Dev:
…follwed by Luis Hernandez with In The Deep End: My Experience as a Linux Kernel Mentee:
The final talks of the day were:
- Mike Butler, who introduced the Open Space portion of the conference with his quick talk, Open Spaces – The Greatest Thing about DevOpsDays,
- Ed LeGault, with Optimizing Software Delivery with DORA Metrics and EBM, and
- Josh Lee, with Modern Application Debugging: An Intro to OpenTelemetry.
Afterwards, we had 90 minutes devoted to Open Space discussions — I pretty much stuck around the AI-related discussion.
At the end of the Open Spaces portion, the conference came to a close with a quick curtain call by the organizers (listed from left to right, as they appear in these photos):
- James Gress
- Troy Koss
- Obie Muzon
- Seni Aguiar
- Chris Ayers
Assisting them were a number of volunteers, all of whose names I don’t have — but my thanks to them for keeping things running smoothly.
DevOpsDays Tampa Bay was a fun conference to speak at, attend, catch up with old friends, and make new ones. I’m looking forward to next year’s event!
