This year for the first time, it worked out to where I got an opportunity to participate in a DevOpsDays that I was not an organizer for. This event happened in Des Moines, IA on 5/2/2019 and 5/3/2019 at the Iowa Events Center. I arrived in town the night before and I got the opportunity to hang out with Eric the IT Guy at the speaker dinner.

The program took an interesting approach of moving back and forth between a shared experience for the entire audience in the ballroom followed by a split decision of two break out sessions. The event kicked off with a focus on Agile Transformations by Pete Anderson.

My favorite talk of the first day came from Emily Nakashima discussing The Incremental Path to Observability

I got the opportunity to present an ignite after lunch the first day.

It was a lot of fun!! However I think it needs something more before I present it in Chicago later in the year.

They put on a really great reception with all sorts of great appetizers and beers where we had to find people that had done things in tech to fill out a bingo card. I loved this and it gave me an opportunity to talk to all sorts of rad people all over the room. After this we had a dinner for out of town organizers at Buzzard Billy’s. There were 3 of us in from KC: Dustin, Chris Stein myself, also Margaret Valtie from Chicago and Jason Lee from all places, but currently Seattle. It was an entertaining conversation over some good creole. I had two kinds of gater.

On day two things kicked off with Ryan Bergman with an awesome keynote Walking Into Mordor: The History and Future of DevOps. It think there are many things from this talk really hit me. It is one that I will likely come back to again and again.

I loved the hallway track at this conference and talked to some really impressive people and companies.

I am also always a fan of on-site printing.

I loved this 3 hour trip north and will likely try to make it back for future events.