DevOpsDays Tel Aviv 2019

This year, DevOpsDays Tel Aviv accepted two of my submitted talks:

No really, don’t chuck everything in Slack: Communications for distributed teams

This is a 40-minute talk that I presented after keynotes on day 2. It deals with the specific challenges that distributed teams face and solve, and has a bunch of ready-to-go suggestions to communicate better as a distributed team.

I had two surprises in this talk:

1. A large number of people still appear to be unfamiliar with the term naked ping, even though just about everyone is very familiar with the antipattern itself. It resulted in an “oh so that’s what that’s called!” reaction from a significant share of the audience.

2. I usually try to not throw shade in my talks. But if and when I do it’s usually about Scrum, which I continue to consider a patently ludicrous idea. I did mention Scrum in a negative manner in my talk, and got a rather unexpected round of mid-talk applause. (My talks generally tend to be rather matter-of-factly; mid-sentence applause is not something I’m used to.) Speaking to a crowd that skewed hard toward the software engineering profession, this always gets me thinking: engineers understand that Scrum is horrible; when will their managers catch on?

The video for this talk is forthcoming, but for now you can find my slides (with full speaker notes) on GitHub.

Five is Fine: A case for small teams

This was a 5-minute talk delivered as part of a round of “Ignite” talks. I use scare quotes because DevOpsDaysTLV uses a somewhat relaxed Ignite format: you must deliver your talk in 5 minutes, but you’re not restricted to the exact number of 20 slides, and your slides also don’t auto-advance every 15 seconds. I did not know this, so I did follow the original Ignite format, using reveal.js autoSlide to advance my slides every 15000 ms.

These talks were also recorded, and the recording should become available relatively shortly (I will update this post when they do). As with the other talk, the slides are available on GitHub and include my notes.

I’d like to thank Rachel for suggesting that I write this talk.

Know a conference that might like these talks?

If you organize a conference that might be interested in including these talks, or you’ve attended one that you think might, please find me on Twitter and let me know. I’ll be happy to submit one of them for consideration. I could definitely expand the Ignite talk into a full standard-length talk — doing the reverse for the other one might be a bit challenging, though.