Ops Talks 2023

Idea

i submitted an abstract to give a talk at this thing but they never got back to me.

now the only alternative is to counter-program their “all day devops” online conference with my own “all day mattops” online conference.

the description of their event was:

The 8th Annual All Day DevOps is on October 26, 2023. Starting at 9:00 AM GMT and continuing for 24 hours, there will be 6 simultaneous tracks, with each track containing a continuous series of 30-minute presentations, for a total of over 90+ hours of presentations. Attendance is free and available through streaming online services.

so to counter-program, we’ll start October 25, 2023 at 0900 US/Pacific and release one or two 10-20 minute talks every hour.

So we’re in a range of somewhere between 240-480 minutes total content (4-8 hours) to drip through a day.

what does it all mean?

• we have 1 month to write, record, edit 4-8 hours of content chunked into 24-48 individual videos
• so we have to have ideas? more than one ideas? ugh. ideas.
• videos? sounds like some gen-z magic. how do videos even work?
• audience? will it be like my website here where i get 4 human visitors a week and 3,000 scraper bots running from aws lying about their user agents?
• impact? what if it’s so amazing everybody who participates gets elected to rule the world?
• scrubscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@informattion
• participate? sure, if you have ideas. the vibe is personal over corporate, implementation over opinion, correct viable opinion over popular worse opinion, performance over abstraction, self-hosting over cloud margins, philosophy over reality, creativity over monetization, privacy over spyware plugins, real time custom-designed observability over we-can-figure-it-out-eventually metrics graveyards, make-the-world-better over make-the-most-profit, custom purpose-fit tools over configuring unfit tools.

Original Submission

here’s what i originally offered as a talk, but didn’t really hear anything back one way or another. maybe they didn’t care because i basically want to complain why everything is slow and bad now versus what we had even 15-20 years.

There and Back Again: How Ops has Changed Over 20 Years (and what hasn’t)

Imagine, if you can, being in the world of 2003. What strange technologies did the sysadmins of such ancient times have the modern world has forgotten? What modern tech marvels do we take for granted the computational novices of 2003 wouldn’t understand?

How has the practice of operations grown and changed in the past 20 years with regard to everything from professional cultural shifts, performance expectations, knowledge growth, knowledge loss, operational tooling, application tooling, platforms, hardware, the death of perl, networking, capacity planning, all up to and including (and beyond) the cloud-eats-all world we live in today?

In this talk, matt shall uncover the secrets of the past, relate the past to how we operationally evolved to modern times, and provide practical examples of how the past still influences our present, how we can do the present better, and how, hopefully, we can continue to create better tomorrows.

Submission Background

The overall goal is a focus on real life experience and how hardware/systems/platform-level orgs operated in the past vs how they seem to operate now, mostly anchored in my own experience working in datacenter automation and internal platforms and public platforms for the past 20+ years.

this is also me trying to rationalize why I’ve seen many recent companies both a.) have multiple active ongoing multi-year operational and platform problems we had solved 15 years ago (what happened between 2015 and 2021 where everybody forgot how computers work?) combined with b.) companies are happy to reject experienced people in interviews due to a 25 year old interviewer’s own lack of operational understanding. one of those “i’ve forgotten more about this than you have ever known” kinda things.

educate them, improve them, win them all over.

Next Steps

stay tuned? email ideas or suggestions or sponsorships to mattops@matt.sh

• scrubscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@informattion

somebody send us a gift card to acquire a dozen things from https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products or https://shop.panasonic.com/pages/lumix

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