Speaker at Devops Gathering 2018

This year and for the first time I attended as speaker at the DevOps Gathering 2018 conference at Bochum Germany! Long story short, it was an extremely great experience for me!

The idea for giving this talk was born in October 2017. I knew that Peter Rossback (a long term friend of us) invented a conference at Bochum Germany for the first time in March 2017. Due to our own journey along the DevOps way, which started in the beginning of 2017, I decide to try to give something back to the container community. Of course, we and I are already participating to various Open Source projects, but I looked for the chance to give a talk too to find out if I am convenient with it. After putting in my CFP for the DevOps Gathering 2018, the organizers decide to give me the chance to speak to a larger audience.

I’ve started the detailed preparation of the talk at the end of the last year and continuously updated it along the things changed at work. There are always last knowings you would like to reflect in a talk. There are fine details here and there and on the last weekend before the talk I decided to recreate a graphic I use in the presentation on my own for example.

My trip to the Devops Gathering 2018 started on Monday afternoon with the drive to the Salzburg airport. As I arrived there, I recognized that may flight to Düsseldorf was delayed by an hour. Not a huge problem as I had plenty of time and after some waiting the plane to Düsseldorf took off. After a short flight (one and a half hour) I took the train from Düsseldorf to Bochum and arrived there at approximately 9 pm. On the first day the speakers dinner took place at a Greek restaurant in Bochum which I managed to attend. That was the first that I met with the other speakers. And obviously it was great (see the pictures)

The next day I arrived at the conference location at 8 am. I already knew the boys and girls from the Bee42 gmbh and therefore it was a comfortable situation for me. The conference took place at the GData campus, a very nice location. And as the hour hand came close to 9 pm, the location gets filled up with people. The DevOps Gathering was sold out and in sum there were more than 150 attendees.

On this day after the lunch break my talk takes place at 1:15 pm. I was already on stage because I placed a video (including audio) in my talk. Audio is always an interesting thing. You never know if it works during a presentation, if you do not try it beforehand. I talked to the tech-staff and we managed it to get it up and running with audio too. By the way, all tracks were recorded. Here are the videos of the tracks from the last year and I am sure that the new ones will pop up there too in the following days.

From my point of view, my talk runs very smooth. No huge problems, only some minor ones. My talk, as all of the other talks, lasts 45 minutes (in English of course) with Q&A afterwards. And to sum it up, I was really fun! Yes, I think it is exciting for me to give talks. If you never try things out and leave your comfort zone, you will never knew what is exciting and satisfaction for you.

During the whole day I had the possibility to talk with the other speakers and of course with attendees too and that was very interesting! In the evening the DevOps Gathering party takes place at the GData campus. Drinks, food, music, cool people and tons of fun! If you have the chance, attend to the next conference if it is possible for you! It is worth it! I came in contact with a lot of people there. For example Roland Huß(Red Hat), Docker captain Viktor Farcic (CloudBees), Thomas Fricke (CTO of Endocode), Jan Bruder (Rancher Labs) just to name some of them and many others, though.

On the second day I had to travel back and therefore I had to left the conference early. But from the talks which I have seen on the second day, I can say that the second day was great too!

After my journey to the DevOps Gathering 2018 I can say that it was very exiting and enjoyable to give a talk, to meet a lot of great people and finally to learn much new things. The discussions we had were great too. Everyone has his or her own experience but we were always able to understand and respect the position of each other and this is what makes conferences so wonderful! Side note: I did this adventure on my own expense. Why? As I wrote above, if you never leave your comfort zone you will never find out what is exiting and enjoyable for you. Now I know, that I would like to continue this way! There was also an attendees questionnaire about the conference in general and the speakers. I am anxious what my marks are and now I am waiting for the videos of the DevOps Gathering 2018.

You can find all speaker an their talks here - click. Have a lot of fun!

-M-