Chef at DevOpsDays Dallas

In the great state of Texas we are lucky enough to have a couple DevOpsDays. This year, Chef was a Platinum Sponsor at the first ever DevOpsDays Dallas on September 15th and 16th. We had Michael Hedgpeth emceeing our maiden voyage. The organizers were able to wrangle up an all star Keynote group of speakers including our very own Nathen Harvey, and Microsoft’s Jeffrey Snover.

Day 1 at DevOpsDays Dallas
Photo credit: @DevOpsDaysDFW

Nathen helped open the two day conference with his talk “Delightful DevOps Days”. He explained the culture of DevOps and how you can help bootstrap it. Nathen is an animated and interactive presenter. He had the whole audience listening to every word.

Nathen Harvey at DevOpsDays Dallas
Photo credit: Annie Hedgpeth @anniehedgie

I presented an Ignite talk about being an introvert at conferences. It was a quick 5 minute talk with some ideas on how to make it as delightful as possible. “Remember, you can always be a Patient Bear. Leverage those lunch tables to your advantage.”

JJ Ashgar at DevOpsDays Dallas
Photo credit: Trevor Hess @trevorghess

The Open Space portion of this conference was unique compared to most other DevOpsDays I’ve attended. With an audience still learning to to leverage the DevOps mentality in their organizations, the Open Spaces revolved around cultural and mental changes. Also, the technical talks weren’t based around Linux and cloud technologies, they were around Azure and Windows! It’s great to see the Windows ecosystem at DevOpsDays.

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JJ Asghar

JJ works with Strategic Technical Alliances at Chef Software making integrations work with Chef, Habitat, and InSpec. He works on everything from Azure, VMware, OpenStack, and Cisco with everything in between. He also heads up the Chef Partner Cookbook Program to make sure customers of Chef and vendors get the highest quality certified cookbooks. He grew up and currently lives in Austin, Texas.