London 2020
Day 1 Open
Welcome to DevOps Enterprise Summit London-Virtual!
GK
Gene Kim
Founder and Author, IT Revolution
JG
Jeff Gallimore
Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Excella
Transcript
Hi, my name is gene Kim. And I'm your MC here at DevOps enterprise. I'm so happy you're here because we created an amazing program for you that you'll get to experience over the next three days. I know it will be an amazing experience as good as any that we've created at our other conferences, especially compared to being stuck on endless video conference calls that we've all been stuck on for months. So this morning, I'm going to go through what our goals are, both at the highest levels. And what's different about this conference, especially because it's an online format made necessary by the COVID-19 global pandemic. So each year I start by posing the question, why are we here? So as in previous years, I think it's the same. We believe that dev ops is important. That dev ops creates genuine value because it helps our organization survive and win in the marketplace because it enables us to best serve our customers and all our stakeholders.
And because we believe that DevOps makes our work humane, as John smart says, we create better value, sooner, safer, and happier. So over the last seven years, we've done 10 events and I'm so proud that we've created what I believe is the best conference for technology leaders to help them succeed and their organizations win. And since 2016, we've been running a conference, both in the U S and in the UK. And so the mission goes on global pandemic or not. In fact, I will make the claim that the mission is even more important in times like this, we are in the middle of the largest economic crisis of our lifetime caused by the largest health crisis of our lifetime. So you may be thinking, what is this mission that I'm talking about? So to motivate that, let's go back to the very beginning devil's enterprise started in 2014 as a conference for horses by horses with no unicorns allowed.
So we defined horses as large complex organizations that have been around for decades, or maybe even centuries. And whereas unicorns were the tech giants, Facebook, apple, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft. So over the years, over 200 enterprises have presented across almost all industry verticals. And over the years, if you look at the talks, you may make a couple of observations that people presenting are more senior, um, is because, well, some of them who are presented have been getting promoted. So we get to follow them along in their journey, but we're also attracting more and more senior executives because our work matters to them. Uh, you'll find that, uh, presenters are often co-presenting with, uh, colleagues from audit security or compliance. These are typically stakeholders outside of the classic Devin ops, uh, value stream, and often they're co-presenting with their business counterpart. And so these business leaders are not just tolerant, uh, or just standing alongside the technology leaders.
Uh, they are talking about how the achievement of all their goals, dreams, and aspirations have come true because of the work that you are doing. So over the years, we've heard some CIO, CTOs, CFOs, uh, chief people, officers, leaders from lines of business and even CEOs. So someone wants to ask me what are my specific goals around the programming? And I shared my answer with the programming committee, but I'm going to share it with you for the first time now. So my goal is to have a CEO from a fortune 50 company present to you on the DevOps enterprise stage by 2025. So you may be asking why, what does that have to do with me? And I would claim that this is very important because for seven years, the top obstacle is verbalized by you and the community has been, how do I get my business leadership on board?
And I want for you to be able to share that video of that CEO presenting with your business leadership, because that story will be to be told by the people they listened to describing how the work that you are doing matters. And we'd be showing that our work is important for the people that matter. That's the capability you are building in your organizations are those that will help your organization survive and win in the marketplace. So here's the crazy part. I think we're very, very close to achieving that. So last year, uh, Jenny wood, the chief operating officer for service at RBS presented, uh, we had Chris O'Malley and Joe ahow, the CEO and CFO of copy or respectively presented on a panel. And I am so delighted that this year we actually have our most senior people speaking, ever tomorrow. Patrick, the chief operating officer of nationwide building society, the largest of a organization of its type in the world.
He'll be presenting with Janet Chapman, one of the three mission leaders. And I'm also very, very excited that later in the year in the Vegas conference, we will have a chief operating officer of a fortune 100 company presenting as well as a president of a company that is publicly traded. So we have a verbal commitments, but we're just not quite ready to announce it, but we were getting so close. So I've talked so far about the mission that we're on together. What I'd like to do now is share with you the structure of this conference and how it different from previous years, the most obvious being that we're now in an online conference. So the first thing I'll mention is that this conference has always been one, primarily made up of experienced reports and that's for a variety of reasons. The first is that as adult learners, as leaders, we don't learn from people telling us what they think we should do, or, uh, to, uh, hearing from people telling us what they might do someday, uh, or even from classroom lectures.
Instead, we really learn from people describing how they solved their problems. And so that's why from the very beginning, uh, the experiences you hear at DevOps enterprise have always followed the specific form. Here's my organization and the industry we compete in. Here's my role and where I fit in. Here's a business problem I set out to solve. Here's where we started in why here's, what we did, including tools and techniques. Here's the outcomes that resulted in the challenges that still remain. And what I find so interesting is that this is actually a very similar form to the scientific method where you state a hypothesis, you perform an experiment, and then you make observations to confirm or disprove the hypothesis. And then you repeat. And so in our first conference in 2014, uh, one year after the Phoenix project came out, uh, all the talks were experienced reports and here are my three observations.
One is that there was a universality to the problems that leaders face in large complex organizations. There was also a feeling that something genuinely exciting and momentous was happening. And I also learned that this is a community that loves helping each other. And I learned it really from these two people. So, uh, this is Heather Mickman. Uh, she was senior development, uh, senior director of development at target at the time. Uh, and next to her is Ross Clanton. And he was senior director of operations. And so they really created the grassroots movement of dev ops inside of target, uh, in the U S they're the second largest retailer. So after the conference, I got an invitation from them to give a talk at target to the senior leadership team and given how grateful I was about them sharing their amazing story. Of course, I said, yes, and hopped on a plane, but I was so surprised at what I found when I arrived, because here's what I saw.
It wasn't just me. They had invited a bunch of speakers from DevOps enterprise to recreate the DevOps enterprise experience for their leaders. So Dr. Nicole Forsgren was there, Jason cos from Disney was there Scott proof and CSG who you'll be hearing tomorrow. Courtney Kissler now at Nike was at Nordstrom. And it was amazing to see what happened in that day. One of their VPs said, trust me, never in our history, have we had an executive from one of our competitors, come in and share what worked and what didn't work. It was such a revelation because I learned how much this community loves helping each other. And it wasn't just this one day I learned later that the teams from Disney and target continued to work together on open-source projects to secure the point of sale systems. And it's far bigger than that. Many of them have joined the program committee to help shape this conference.
And I apologize for missing Dr. Topo pal from capital one who has been on the committee for two years. And Scott Prugh, who asked to join earlier this year. And I said with enthusiasm, yes, of course, because everything he touches, it gets better, but it's more than just that since 2015, uh, we have gathered a group of these leaders, um, to identify the top obstacle to problems they face, uh, in their work. And we gathered them in Portland, Oregon for three days and they write guidance papers. So since 2015, they've written 75 papers. Uh, actually more than that downloaded by the broader community over 70,000 times. So here is a group that loves working together and doing work that impacts the broader community. I've always been in awe of this work and the work they do. And I, for years, I've wondered what you call this amazing dynamic.
So one day I stumbled upon the word seniors coined by Brian Eno. So Brian Eno was a famous musician record producer visual artist, and he's known for helping, uh, bands help define and reinvent the sounds including, uh, bands like U2 devote talking heads and more. And so Brian Eno defined seniors like this, despite heroic mythology, lone geniuses do not drive most scientific cultural business or policy advances. Instead breakthroughs typically will emerge from a scene, an exceptionally productive community of practice that develops novel epistemic norms, major innovation, main D ticket genius, but genius is created in part by seniors. He goes on Sr stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is a communal form of the concept of genius individuals immersed in a senior's or blossom and produce their best work. And when boy buoyed by a seniors, you act like a genius, your like-minded peers and the entire environment inspire you.
I love that. And third individuals immersed in a seniors or blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by a senior, you act like a genius, your like-minded peers and the entire environment inspire you. So when I look around at the DevOps enterprise summit, this is exactly what I see mutual appreciation. Risky moves are plotted by the group. Subtlety is appreciated, friendly competition, goats to shy CS can be thought of the best of peer pressure, rapid exchange of tools and techniques. As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside of a common language and sensibility. And there's a network effect of success. When a record is broken, a hit happens or breaks through erupts to success as claimed by the entire scene, this empowers the scene to further success. And so when I think about the DevOps enterprise community, this is exactly what I see.
So this is how the invention of the dojo at target by Ross Clanton of quickly spread throughout the community, the state of DevOps report by Dr. Nicole. Forsgren just humble us since 2014, disseminated so quickly through this community project to product, uh, originally, uh, thought through and informed by Russ Clanton and Dr. Mccarsten, uh, we see rapid dissemination of practice from Disney to Adidas to BMW, uh, is so exhilarating to see how, uh, practices are picked up for you science nerds. This may actually sound familiar for those of you, uh, familiar with the work of Dr. Thomas Kuhn. I think you'll see that this is exactly what she talks about in his book, the structure of scientific revolution. So Dr. Thomas Kuhn introduced the terms, paradigm shift and inflection point. And so when he studied the, uh, the scientific revolutions, as we went from Copernican to Newtonian to Einsteinian, it always looks like the work of one person.
Uh, but if you zoom in, it turns out there's always a cohort of scientists trying to explain anomalies. Uh, sometimes in cooperation, sometimes in, uh, competition, uh, one person usually gets a credit, but it always usually happens within a scene. So I think this is the big challenge for us in our seniors is that the technology function is so often misunderstood by senior business leaders and there's often over delegated or even advocated to those technology people. So instead, what we all know is that amazing business outcomes are created when technology is fully integrated into all aspects of technology, uh, into all aspects of strategy and operations. And so, uh, this is why I'm so excited that, uh, by the seniority and the people showing up in the DevOps enterprise stage. So how do we get there? So I've talked about experienced reports. Uh, I'd like to talk about the second type of talk that we have here at DevOps enterprise and that's expert talks.
So this is one of my favorite examples of this in 2017, we assembled the, an amazing panel from the best experts from safety culture and the lean movement. So on the left is Dr. Sidney Dekker, uh, on the right is Dr. Richard Cook. And in the middle is, uh, Dr. Steven spear, who you will hear from later today and, uh, on the edges are John Willis and me, and it was amazing to hear them, uh, explore the intersection and actually reveal how these movements actually support each other. Another one of my favorites was in, uh, it was last year in Las Vegas, where we had representatives from each one of the big four auditors busting myths that DevOps can't be done in large complex organizations. Uh, and, uh, I love that. They said we actually need you to adopt DevOps because we want our clients to be around, uh, in 10 years.
And as Corey Quinn said, uh, only at DevOps enterprise do people cheer when the auditors arrive. And so over the years, we've invited so many experts to share, uh, and teach us what we need to know. Uh, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, uh, teachings about state of DevOps, um, Christina Maslack, uh, Dr. Matlock talking about burnout, Dr. Andre Martin about, uh, learning organizations, uh, Dr. McPherson from about project to product and Dr. David Amita, but one of the largest workplace engagement programs I've ever seen, but this conference is so much more than just people with PhDs. This is John from KeyBank presenting in 2017. So how did he get here? He attended the conference in 2016 and went back with a sense of mission and urgency and took advantage of a crisis, which was all their online banking systems, uh, for consumers going down and use that to spark a revolution of his own and was back the next year to present their story.
And I love that you see this pattern over and over. It delights me so much that this year, um, the same thing's happened, Paul from coats attended DevOps enterprise last year, he's presenting on day three and packet Elkridge from nationwide building society already mentioned, he's presenting tomorrow, and he's doing that because he attended the conference last year. So it's not just about people becoming speakers. Really the most important interactions are the ones that happen away from the stage is the talks are there to give us something, to emulate, to surface problems that we need to solve together, to help create the peer groups that everyone needs in order to solve the problems that matter to you. And so that's why I asked every speaks to end with a talk that says, ah, here's a help I'm looking for, or here's the obstacles that still remain, because this opens the opportunity for you to help others or others to help you.
And so when I see pictures like this, I see a vibrant community that is mutually exothermic, uh, helping each other achieve their own goals. And so, by the way, here's a bunch of pictures I put together while writing a blog post called love letter to conferences. It was so fun to collect, you know, the 700 pictures of my favorite photos of conferences over the last 10 years. And I pulled out a couple to show you how meaningful conferences have been for me. So, uh, you'll see, John Allspaw and the upper left, uh, who I met in 2011, who's presenting later today. Uh, I met Dominica DeGrandis there, uh, at the same year I met Patrick Dubai the year prior at DevOps stays. And I'll go into more about him later. I finally met Dr. Nicole Forsgren at a conference. In fact, I met almost all my co-authors at conferences, and here's another thing that conferences enabled for me.
So this is Mike Nygaard. I met him at, uh, the velocity conference in 2011. Uh, here she is two years later where he's actually showing me this crazy programming language called closure, just befuddled me. It didn't even look like code. And yet four years later in 2016, uh, I fell in love with closure and it became my favorite programming language that re-introduced, re-introduced the joy of coding back into my life. And that I now self identify, not as an ops person, which I've done for 20 years, but as a developer. And I wrote this blog post called love letter to closure. And then three years later, I meet rich Hickey, the inventor of closure at the closure conch conference. And here I am listening to him as he's teaching me about architectural coupling and why it's so damaging. So that moment will be one of the moments I cherish most in my professional career.
So I know these types of experiences are those that you're having to, and, uh, let's face it. It's not just about learning and helping each other. I know that this is a group that loves hanging out with each other to where lifelong relationships are formed. So what is amazing to me is that I am having fun too. This conference is one of my favorite things to do in any given year. And one of the greatest things about it is that my wife and my boss, Margaret Kim, is one who it makes this event possible. So this is what for me makes for a great conference, high learning, high networking, and high fun. So there will be no pictures like this this year, because as you know, this is a virtual conference. And so we had a unique opportunity in April to, uh, put some, do some experiments.
So I'd mentioned the DevOps enterprise forum, which is where we write the guidance paper every year. And we announced that it would be virtual. And, uh, some of us were so skeptical that this could work virtually that we could actually generate the written guidance, uh, when none of us could meet together, that we could actually have the serendipitous rewarding interactions that make these physicals conferences so great. And yet it blew me away that when I made a graph of my energy level, uh, over the three days, it was so similar to how I would feel how I felt in previous years when it was physical, the same highs of learning, the same joys of hanging out with friends who I admire, and even the remorse that I felt on the beginning of day two from staying out too late with friends on day one. So for the last three months, we have been studying deeply online events.
And I love this quote from Bob live events are theatrical, online events are cinematic, and that was such an aha moment for me. And this resulted in a whole cascade of decisions. So one of the biggest implications is that we decided that all talks would be prerecorded. Uh, one of my experiences is that it's very frustrating when you're trying to watch a talk and you spend the first five or 10 minutes watching the speaker, trying to get their audio working. So we want to neutralize that risk, uh, by making sure that all talks are prerecorded beforehand, but, uh, the decisions go far further than that. So the reason why I wrote the 7,000 word blog post, um, or a love letter to conferences was that I wanted to think, um, deep, I wanted to understand what elements are universal in a conference, whether it's virtual or physical, and which ones could be changed to take advantage of the online format.
I love this quote in order to think clearly requires you to often write clearly. And that has been so true of many things in my career. So here's the plenary session. This is where the dungeon master controls the game. Um, and that means most of us remains the same because we use the plenary session to put on stage experience reports that are success stories that we celebrate that inspire us, that elevate and raise the bar, uh, that drive us forward. This is where we set the language and norms and model them on stage. And this is where we bring in experts to teach what we all need to know to get from here to there. So one of the things that we wanted to address was a missing engagement between the speaker and the audience, and what was so exciting is that we are making all speakers available.
Uh, they will be on slack while their talk is playing. And many of them are actually making additional time to interact with you later in the conference. So I think that is something that is awesome. And I can't wait to see how that goes. So that's the general session. Let's talk about the breakout sessions. So in the plenary, the dungeon master controls the game in the breakout sessions. You control the game, you choose to talk to you on a, see you seek out the people you want to interact with. And as a bonus, uh, we all know the feeling of seeing a bunch of great talks that we have to choose between that are happening simultaneously. That will never happen now because we making all breakout talks available and they're already published. So this allows you the most freedom to explore and find out who are the right people that you want to go meet, uh, and interact with.
So the, uh, the last portion of a great conference is the networking time. And so we've more than doubled the amount of networking time compared to previous years. And we thought very carefully about how to maximize the chances of useful and, uh, even serendipitous interactions. And Jeff will describe that in more detail later. So here's my advice use this time? Well, it has been my experience that the best conference experiences tend to involve planning and being intentional. Uh, so networking is more than just being friendly is about finding the right people to help you achieve your goals. So sometimes it's seeking those who have expertise that you need, or those with connections, or maybe recruiting helpers or finding fellow travelers. And I'll just remind you the best way to, uh, uh, to get help is to offer help first. So give before you get, so I'm going to turn it over Jeff shortly, but I do want to say this first as I'm recording this, I've seen every one of the keynote talks at least twice, some of them many, many more times.
And based on what I've seen, I know that this is the best programming we've ever done. I'm so excited to share what we've put together for you, uh, for over the next three days. So before we go into the amazing talks, Jeff is going to present the user's manual for this conference. One of my experiences attending a bunch of online events. It is so easy to get lost. Uh, where did everybody go or what button am I supposed to push, or even having profound fear of what happens when you push the button? So, uh, Jeff's job is to keep the trains running on time and to make sure that everyone gets to where they need to go. And speaking from personal experience, I know that there is no one better at this than Jeff Jeff, over you.
Hey everybody. And welcome to the DevOps enterprise summit, 2020 in London. And because we're virtual around the world, gene and the programming committee have put together an amazing lineup of speakers who will blow your mind with the things they've done and the things that they know. You're definitely going to get a lot of incredible insights from their talks, but those talks are primarily one way sharing from the speaker to you and the audience. We all know that we can get a ton of value from two way interactions and two way sharing. And we want to create those of opportunities for interactions between you and the speakers and between you and each other. Now, let me run through some of those opportunities. Now in past years, we've gotten together in person and this year, obviously we're not doing that. We're virtual, But we still have a lot of the same things that made the DevOps enterprise summit. Great. We have great speakers. We have great attendees. We have great sponsors. We have great networking opportunities. We're interacting through slack. We have a code of conduct. So the learning and the community are still great, But because we're virtual, some things are going to be a little bit different. We have new ways of interacting with speakers and attendees and sponsors. And what's obvious is we're watching this through our browsers. So the ways to learn and interact are going to be a little bit different than when we've gotten together in person.
Now, as I mentioned, we'll be watching the talks primarily through our browser and interacting with others primarily through slack. So let me show you how to get around the event in your browser and in slack Now for watching the talks in your browser navigate to watch and the top level menu for the event website, see the talks that are happening right now on the schedule, or you can navigate to schedule in the top level menu, find the talks that you want to watch and click on watch to watch them. We're also interacting in slack. Many of us uses use slack for our daily work, especially these days. And so we're going to use slack for what we use it for in our daily work. We're going to engage with speakers, sponsors and each other, both during and after the conference, the slack workspace is going to continue on. You can get on board at this link on the slide, or you can go to the networking menu in the top level menu for the event website, There are some slack channels that are relevant and you should pay paying attention to, and I'll explain each of these. As we go through the orientation to the event.
Now, first engaging with speakers. This is the opportunity that you have to ask the amazing speakers, some questions,
And because we're virtual, we get to do something a little bit different in a physical event when we're getting together, their speakers on stage are well speaking. In this case, the speakers will be available in slack during their scheduled presentation time. So you can post your question in the corresponding, ask the speaker channel in slack at mentioned the speaker both during and after their presentation. If you have thoughts on a question, someone else asked, please contribute. Now, as I mentioned, we have different slack channels corresponding to the different programming tracks on the schedule. We have one channel for the keynotes and we have one channel for each of the four tracks in the schedule. Make sure you're asking your question in the right channel.
We have lots of great networking opportunities. We have a block of networking time. Each of the three days for you to interact with speakers and with other attendees, there are no talks and no other programming during this time. So the FOMO should be low. Let's go through each one of these. The first one is birds of a feather. And these are sessions for you to find other attendees and interact with other attendees who share similar interests. The way that you join a birds of a feather conversation is to first join the birds of a feather slack channels for topics that interest you. Each of those channels starts with B O F join the active call in the channel at the networking time to join the live video discussion post in slack during and after the discussion. And then after the birds of a feather session ends continue the conversation. We have 10 different birds of a feather channels. So there should be something that interests you.
The second networking opportunity is lean coffee. Yes, we're bringing this back from the physical summits that we've had in the past and Dominica to grant us. Our lean coffee leader is leading lean coffee. Again, she's found a way to do this virtually. So we'll be using zoom, breakout rooms and mural, which is a collaborative virtual whiteboard to do this, just join the zoom call and we'll take care of the rest. And the last networking opportunity that we have is chat roulette. This is an experiment we're running for this virtual event, and this is for you to have one-on-one conversations with other attendees, with similar interests, join the snack club channel in slack, answer a few questions to build your profile and then type slash snack to be randomly paired with another attendee. When you're ready to chat there. For those of you that have been to other conferences and events, uh, you might be familiar with the law of mobility.
The law of mobility says this, that if you find yourself in a place where you're neither learning, nor contributing, maybe like this person, then you should respectfully navigate to find a place where you can. Now we've got a lot of networking opportunities and a lot of opportunities to learn. Which one do you choose? Well, what is your learning goal? Is it specific or is it general? What's your energy level at the time of the networking? Is it high or is it low? How much do you want to contribute? And how much do you want to consume? Each of the networking opportunities is going to provide a different way to engage. So choose the one that's right for you. We have the slush session slides and videos available. The videos of the keynote talks were available after they air the videos of the breakout talks are actually available right now.
The slides are also available for download both in Dropbox and in get hub. And because we're all part of the same community, we should treat each other well, regardless of whether we're in person or virtual, we want everyone to have an amazing time here at the summit. And our code of conduct reflects that we've posted the code of conduct in slack, but let me give you the, just listen. Well, when someone else is sharing, Sharewell when you have something to say, respect everyone at all times and speak up. If you see something or hear something that isn't consistent with, the environment that we want for this community, if you have any issues, email, help at it, revolution.com or direct message me, Jeff dot gala, more in slack. Now I'd like to list all of your support in creating the kind of harassment free environment that we want for this community. I mentioned that we've posted the code of conduct in slack. So I'm going to give you a few seconds to go into the general channel in slack. Find that code of conduct post, and then just please give it your favorite emoji to indicate your support. I'll give you a few seconds to do that.
All right. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Now the DevOps enterprise summit is brought to you by it revolution. These are the same people that bring us our favorite books, like the Phoenix project, the unicorn project, the DevOps handbook and accelerate. And this event is in partnership with sneak. We've really tapped into their expertise about virtual events, and we really appreciate the support and helping us with this. We'd also like to say a big thank you to our virtual BFF sponsors at LaSeon digital AI PagerDuty get hub Tasktop slack, get lab LaunchDarkly Sona type and Datadog our community sponsors. And also our media sponsors who are helping to get the word out about this great community. Now, the thank yous to our sponsors are genuine. This event doesn't happen without their support, the incredible people in the dev ops enterprise community. You is why we have so many awesome sponsors who want to help you in your journey. So go talk to them. In the expo hall, we have a virtual expo hall you can navigate to the expo and the top level menu visit each sponsor who has a booth there, ready to help you. And remember sponsors add sparkle to your dev ops journey.
Now, finally, we have some fun games navigate to games in the top menu of the website to learn about those games. In addition to being fun, you can also win stuff. Now, if you need any help or you have any questions you can post in the summit, help channel in slack, you can email help at it. revolution.com or if all else fails, you can direct message me Jeff gala more in slack. Whew, that's it. We want you to have an amazing time at the summit. Jean, let me hand it back to you to announce this year's for speaker.
Thanks, Jeff. This is another great thing about conferences that I want to share with you. So I've found in my career, there are many situations where I don't actually want to learn how to solve a problem. I want to pay someone else will solve it for me because it's their core competency, not mine. And there was one particular situation where I had a favorite tool and it got acquired by another great vendor. Uh, and they announced that they're going to sunset it. And it just happened. I went to their user conference and, uh, I was wanting to know what my options were. And I remember, uh, uh, asking who could help me being passed to four different people, but it was great because they introduced me to one person who said, don't worry, I'll take care of you. Uh, we're figuring something out. And it was, it was great.
And, and so one of the great things about devil's enterprise that has always impressed me is that our sponsors bring great people. They bring their best experts. And as senior executives, all of who want to help you. So we thought deeply about how do we allow meaningful interactions between you and our sponsors? And, you know, we don't want them to send endless emails to you after the event. We want them to connect with you here. Your teams are here, their teams are here, you're both here. So in the spirit of invention, creativity, experimentation, here's what we did. We created an interest list that every sponsor and attendee fills out to enable them to match with people who have similar interests, skills and capabilities and needs. So here's what we did. We created interests plus, uh, so that every sponsor and attendee fills out those, uh, 3, 2, 1.
So here's what we did. We created an interest list that every sponsor and attendee fills out to allow us to match people with needs, uh, and interest with people, with capabilities, um, and skills. And so Jeff mentioned the attendee code of conduct. We also have a sponsor code of conduct, and it really, it really boils down to four things, be specific. In other words, don't be general and spam. Everybody be helpful, be respectful and be a good community member. And so, as everyone knows, whenever you're doing experiments, it's super important to observe the results. So I've used a sponsor code of conduct as being just as important as the attendee code of conduct. So if you have any sponsor interactions that you'd categorize as unwelcome, just contact Jessica Calmar on slack. And conversely, if you have amazing interactions with sponsor, post that in summit stories or in the sponsors channel, because we want to celebrate sponsors who are helping make this community better.
Alright, there's one more thing I want to talk about and it's this guy because without Patrick Debar, we would literally not be here at this conference today. So it's March, 2020, uh, and we are learning, we're not only attending all the online events that we can, uh, we're trying to learn about what it's like to run them. And I'm so grateful to all of these people for being willing to talk with me and tell me, share with me what they're learning and you'll recognize many of these names from this community. And, uh, among the many things that I was trying to understand was what was the right platform to run this conference on, uh, to make this event happen. And back then I knew nothing useful about online conferences, but then in April, something amazing happened. I, I attended the, all the talks online event, uh, and so that was run by and it was created and run by Patrick tabla, the godfather of dev ops and his teammates, Sam Hepburn.
And it blew my mind, uh, afterwards I told Patrick how much I loved it. And so for those of you who don't know, Patrick coined the term dev ops in 2009, he created dev ops days. The amazing events series has created hundreds events around the world, and he was a coauthor on the DevOps handbook. And we've been friends for nearly a decade. What you might not know is that he spent five years as a CTO at a startup, which created online events to support online TV events and online streaming, where he built up a ton of experience with production broadcast. So he had hand built that incredible platform that powered all the talks online. And it was by far my favorite online conference experience. So I'm so grateful that Patrick spent two hours with me sharing with me how he built it, how he ran it.
And, uh, my impression was, uh, holy cow, once again, he's on the frontier. And, uh, he's again, showing that he's really one of the best in the game and there was no way we could do it ourselves. In fact, when Michael Winslow, uh, from Comcast introduced me to the production operations team that support the NBC studios, they basically said nothing like that exists. That's actually what we would build for you. If we had time, um, you should go with it. And so, uh, that's when I called up guy, Pajaro the founder and president of sneak with a pretty big ask. I asked whether they would be willing to mobilize the same small army. It took to run all the talks online so that we could run dev ops enterprise on the platform that Patrick built. And I'm so grateful that he said yes. So almost everything you see on the screen was created for you by Patrick, this viewer, the speaker information to your left, all the schedules that you see down below.
Um, and right now Sam Hepburn and Patrick Debois are in the production room, queuing up these videos, making sure that everything is working as they design. So thank you so much, Sam and Patrick, for all your great work. And I can tell you this when the stakes are high, like running an online conference, does nothing quite like having Patrick TBA tell you, don't worry, gene, we've got this. So I've had so much fun working with him and Sam and as you know, great friends lead to great adventures, or maybe it's even vice versa. So also thank you guy for making this happen. And as a small gesture of our appreciation, I'd love for you to say some words to all of you.
Hello everyone. I'm president and co-founder of snake. I'm very excited this year to be partnering with the DevOps enterprise summit. To me, the DevOps enterprise summit played a key role in evolving devolves into the world of the enterprise in allowing all of you really to share your learnings and help all of us together, combined the goodness of dev ops, this, this notion of continuous delivery of a fast time to market the cultural shift that that represents or requires, uh, and combine that with the needs that we have in the enterprise, sometimes constraints sometimes just priorities and successfully result in enterprises. Being able to tap into the goodness of dev ops. And I think doing so very successfully because you can see DevOps being embraced by enterprises worldwide. To me, security is very much the next iteration or the next step in that journey. We focus a lot on secure platforms in DevOps, but we still have a long ways to go around having great practices on how to build secure applications as they get developed and shipped.
So continuously snake is all about that. If you don't know us, we have an open source security offering today that focuses on finding and fixing vulnerabilities in open source dependencies. And we have a container security offering that thinks about containers more as devolution of the app, then the evolution of the VM, but above all of those, we are a dev first security company. We focus on helping developers who were asking to make decisions, you know, autonomously and quickly help them make those decisions secure and alongside that help governance teams, security teams, platform teams, help them govern successfully while empowering those developers to make decisions, you know, but still keeping the enterprise secure. I'm sure you're going to enjoy many of the talks in this conference. We have some amazing talks ahead. I'm going to tune into as many of those as I can. And what I would ask is, as you think about, you know, when you learn all these different new techniques and approaches to, you know, run a faster delivery process and not in a better one, keep in mind, you know, security, think about how do you not just embrace these new approaches and ship faster, but also how do shave more security?
That's it for me? Enjoy the conference.
Thank you guy. All right. I've talked a lot about the great programming we have for you. It's time to share with you what we've put together. So as they say in show biz, enjoy the show. Here we go.