2021/07/07 - Opportunities in The Atlanta Tech Community

C.A. Corriere

TL;DR We’re trying to host at least one more devopsdays Atlanta.

My Introduction to DevOps

Years ago I was hired as a consultant at a large Atlanta based company. The first task my team asked me to complete sounded simple enough: Help a team get outbound connectivity on a couple of ports. I wasn’t responsible for making the change, just helping them coordinate it.

The problem was the rule was already in the firewall. The consensus was the dev team I was trying to help was kind of dumb and were doing something wrong. I checked their code out of SVN and was able to run it locally with no problems, so I started poking at the network on the command line. Sure enough the traffic kept dropping off right before it hit the firewall.

A day later I’m in a meeting room with the project manager. None of the folks they invited showed up, so they called the infosec team responsible for the firewall on the conference phone instead. Everyone was annoyed. Everyone was threatening to escalate. I ask if we can just step through the problem together, it might take all of ten minutes.

I told the network engineer every command I was typing in so they could follow along on their machine. It was mostly just ping and traceroute, but easy enough to see traffic leaving the server and dying right before it made it to the other side of the firewall. I said something to the effect of “if the rule is there it isn’t working”, which prompted the engineer (now more confused than frustrated) to delete it and re-enter it. Suddenly everything started working as expected. We were later told there was a bug in the firewall they didn’t know about and our little field exercise had prompted some firmware updates.

Afterwards one of managers told me “I can’t tell you what devOps is, but you’re definitely doing it” and handed me a copy of The Phoenix Project. I read it over the weekend and was immediately sold. We setup devOps round tables to watch videos during lunch with an open discussion afterwards. My managers were happy with the technical work I was doing, but were really excited about the cultural changes taking place. I asked if anyone had actually gone out to Silicon Valley and met any of these people, which they had not. I asked if I could go to Velocity in Santa Clara to meet Gene Kim, an author of The Phoenix Project, and surprisingly enough they sent me.

Getting involved in the Atlanta Community

When I got back to Atlanta I made an effort to engage the local tech scene and was a little frustrated. It was oddly corporate and not that technical at the time. Even worse, not only was there a devopsdays Atlanta the year before, but Gene Kim had presented! I had MISSED IT!!

There was no 2014 or 2015 devopsdays Atlanta event, but one did get started in 2016. I had attended devopsdays Minneapolis, Alterconf Atlanta, and had spoken at devopsdays NYC and devopsdays Pittsburgh by this time, so I joined on as a co-organizer. Having experienced multiple events as an attendee and a presenter gave me some idea of what was expected, which made planning a lot easier (especially the diversity and inclusion parts). Thanks to the community of devopsdays organizers around the world, my co-organizers have never had to take my word for any of it either. There’s always a second opinion on Slack. My operating agreement has always been pretty simple: I’m fine with getting out-voted, I just want to know who will help me clean up the potential mess I’m trying to avoid should things go sideways. Thankfully we haven’t had too many messes, and most of them have been easy enough to clean up.

2020 was such a mess we didn’t even have an event. I’m hoping we can get COVID cleaned up eventually, but it’s already taking years to do. In the meantime in person conferences are coming back online, so it’s time for another devopsdays Atlanta.

I was lucky enough to get flown out to Silicon Valley to go to Velocity back in the day, but not everyone in Atlanta gets opportunities like that. While there are other tech conferences in Atlanta, we’re one of the few that’s community lead, which means none of the organizers make any money off of devopsdays Atlanta. We’re able to keep our ticket prices at cost and give a lot of tickets away because we can’t do anything with any of the money but try to build upon the diverse and inclusive Atlanta community. Seeing Atlanta finally show up on the “most awesome tech cities” list, then rise, has absolutely been a team effort from the Atlanta community. I’ll admit it feel good knowing I’ve played some part in it.

What’s even better are the smaller tokens of appreciation. I regularly have folks pull me aside at events and tell me they felt welcomed and included, met someone that lead to a new job, they picked up a bunch of ideas at an open space that lead to a promotion, or my desperate attempts to find enough speakers for ignite talks ended up launching their career as a presenter, a leap they likely would not have taken otherwise.

In some cosmic stroke of irony, the artwork for our 2020 event was a bird of prey I nicknamed the Phoenix-Hawk, which could not be more appropriate now that it’s 2021. We’re rising out of COVID. The Atlanta Hawks are out of the play-offs but looking forward to 2022. I’m coming into a new form of existence after burning myself to the ground too, but those details are really outside the scope of this post. Getting more people involved in the community is the priority here.

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