Last Tuesday was a Grand Unified Meetup of the DC-area DevOps-like groups. Lopsa-DC was there, as was Crabby Admins, DevOpsDC and a bunch of others I hadn't heard of before. It was great. And now the YouTube videos are posted!
The first presentation on Ops School:
Ops School is something I first heard about at this last LISA conference, and even spoke with the guys for a while. This is a project that sprang out of Etsy, but is worth it for the rest of us. While there are some sysadminly degree programs out there, the vasty majority of us learned it on-the-job as it were. Ops School is aiming to build an actual curriculum for people to try and get basically fluent or to brush up on areas we're not all that familiar with.
I already have ideas on how I can contribute.
The second talk, on how to have a career in what it is that we do:
Occasionally profane, but a good overview of how we have jobs in this thing. And a critique of the whole DevOps idea in the first place, which is a very nice contrast to the gestalt view I've picked up elsewhere.
DevOps is all about teaching Ops to Dev.
Theo's point is that Ops is something that everyone needs to get fluent in. That's how a business, especially a web-oriented one, survives. It means that Dev learns to be cautious about making changes to live systems. It means the sysadmins learn that certain kinds of outage (the partial, some-features-are-disabled kind) can be more damaging to a company than a full-stop outage.
And Ops is not the sole purview of the sysadmin-staff, the Sales staff are extremely ops-oriented. It means customer care is a major factor in deciding which changes are worth the risk, and it's usually not the Sysadmin staff who know best what the customers want.
Anyway, watch the video.