DevOps Gathering 2019

For the second time I attend to the DevOps Gathering as a speaker. This year I shared the stage with Alexander Ortner, a colleague and friend of mine, and we did our talk together. Also Bernhard Rausch was with us, but we have to leave him back during our travelling challenge. 😮

Our travelling challenge started on Tuesday, 12th March at 5am at our workplace. The plan was to travel to Salzburg airport by car to catch our flight to Düsseldorf. Normally this ride takes about 90 minutes. Our flight was scheduled for 8:25am, usually plenty of time reserve. But this day was one of these days, where hardly anything works as expected. The first thing that happened was that a truck crash stopped our ride to Salzburg airport. Unfortunately we were locked down on the motorway for more than two hours and therefore we were not able to catch up our flight.

As the previous plan was that we were going to attend to the DevOps Gathering 2019 as private persons, all chances were gone to reach our talk on Wednesday. But during the booking of the flight some month ago and the day this story happens, our employer, STRABAG BRVZ Gmbh, was so kind to support our travel. Therefore Alex called his principal and we got a go to book flights for Alex and me (Mario) from Munich. MANY, MANY THANKS FOR THIS SUPPORT TO STRABAG BRVZ GMBH! 💗

But we had to leave back Bernhard at Salzburg train station 😓. Nevertheless Alex and I (Mario) went on to Munich to catch the flight from there. After the ride to Munich we were able to check in in-time and after a rough flight with a nice side-wind landing we caught the train to Bochum without any problems. After thirteen hours we arrived at the DevOps Gathering location at Bochum (G-Data) finally.

As we arrived, we received a really huge welcome from the other attendees! Special thanks to Xinity, you are always welcome my friend! We talked a lot with the other attendees and we were able to catch up with the latest information. After some hours we left the venue and went back to our hotel where Alex and I updated our presentation with a special slide to honor Bernhard for all that he tries to be with us. It’s always about the people and friends - people matter!

Next day, we started early to get all up and running and to test our equipment at the conference location. Then it was stage time and overall all went smooth! You can find the slides from our presentation on Speaker Deck | C4 - Continuous Culture Change Challenges! It’s a different if you do a talk alone or if you share the stage. Both ways have different challenges. After the talk we got a load of positive feedback! And we would like to say THANK YOU for all your positive feedback!

An hour later or so, I checked the trains from Düsseldorf to Bochum for our return travel and that’s where I noticed that all trains from Düsseldorf to Bochum were cancelled for the whole day because of the storm (trees on the train track). Niclas Mietz from the Bee42 (DevOps Gathering Organizer) was so kind to bring us to Essen, where we were able to catch our flight to Munich. After the ride back to our working location we arrived happily.

The DevOps Gathering 2019 was a great conference for us, even if we were not able to be there for long time. But it was very, very nice to see how everyone tried to help us and our short stay was very intensive. Many, many thanks for all who have supported us! 🤗

And here is the recording of our talk!

Here are some pictures from the conference!