A little story about one of the largest online conference on DevOps, Modern Infrastructure and more....
Before getting into story, let me explain briefly about the All Day DevOps conference.
All Day DevOps is a FREE online community responsible for creating the world’s largest DevOps conference. - https://www.alldaydevops.com
This year (All Day DevOps 2017) was over 100 speakers with 45 minute sessions across five different tracks in all time zones, simultaneously! That is a crazy 24 hours of learning about DevOps, Security, Culture and Automation.
High level overview of the tracks
How I got into moderation from being a presenter last year
It all started the previous year, where I presented at All Day DevOps 2016 about my research on Automated Infrastructure Security Monitoring with FOSS. I interacted with a lot of organisers and track moderation teams and discussed about DevSecOps and how I can contribute to sharing my knowledge and learning from the community.
I submitted to the All Day DevOps 2017 and I generally kept in touch with organisers over Slack to help out as required. Then Derek E. Weeks asked me “Do you want to moderate All Day DevOps?” and without thinking I replied “Yes!” I was super excited to be part of the greater community and contribute my little part to make it awesome.
Then I told him that I am already presenting my talk this year about Modern Security Operations aka Secure DevOpsand I personally wanted to do both.
I have asked my company (Appsecco) about spending some time for the event and they agreed happily as we are already supporters for All Day DevOps. My team mate Bharath went a step further and agreed to participate as well to moderate the Modern infrastructure track.
Moral of the story — Don’t be afraid to ask to help out in your community. You never know what is possible when you do.
Getting more volunteers
While doing some ground work and spreading the word across different communities and channels the organisers asked us if we find more women volunteers to join the event to increase their participation. We started asking known people from null community. We found multiple women from the community who were willing to help. and introduced them to the organisers for next steps.
Day of the event
Moderation setup was very different from the speaker setup as we were using Google hangouts to do live broadcasts. Don’t forget this was my first time managing an online conference with over 30,000 people from all over the world!
Then the day arrived 24th 2017, I had to present and moderate the DevSecOps track. I started working on setting up things and started my talk after the keynote.
My presentation had lot of content about how we can build modern world operations aka DevOps with built-in security. It includes covering lots of tools, techniques and methodologies from DevSecOps. I got great feedback in the slack channels of all day devops.
I converted my setup for moderation (thanks to i3wm, it always rocks!). It was a simple setup to manage both moderation of speakers, organisers and attendees via Slack and Google Hangouts.
It was an awesome experience and lots of learning about managing conference tasks at scale with different time zones and geographies. This gave me a great connect with multiple people in different experiences and areas of knowledge.
I am ready for the next year All Day DevOps 2018. To make it another amazing event in the world about DevOps, Security, Culture and Automation.
I would like to acknowledge that my company Appsecco, Akash Mahajan and Bharath helped me throughout the conference as I was new to this kind of thing and thank them for all the support and help.