DevOpsDays, Technical Storytelling, and Loading the Dishwasher, with Jason Yee

About this Episode

Jason Yee is a Staff Technical Advocate at Datadog and one of three global co-chairs of DevOpsDays, and both jobs turn out to be mostly about getting other people to talk. Whitney and Coté ask him how the DevOpsDays machine actually works - local teams run the events, a global core team advises, and the co-chairs exist as a final escalation point - and what happens to conference sponsorship now that DevOps is mature rather than hot. His answer is that the sponsors who do well have stopped counting leads and started running workshops, on the grounds that a Lego giveaway gets you a list of people who wanted Lego.

They also get into why DevOpsDays has a human streak that other tech subcultures never picked up, with Jason putting most of the "blame" on John Allspaw and safety science; Jason's Ignite talks in Amsterdam, including a DevOps children's book read aloud in his own bad Dutch; whether people drawn to systems are simply a particular kind of person, tested here by asking what everyone does when they open a badly loaded dishwasher; and Jason's actual day job, which is a technical storytelling team he thinks is the only one of its kind - talking Datadog engineers and executives into telling their own stories, then ghostwriting the session description and outline so they have something to react to instead of a blank page.

DevOpsDays Portland is back for the first time since 2021, September 8 through 10, with Whitney giving both a workshop and a talk.

Jason has no home page and would rather you did not look for him: "go touch grass, get outside, get some fresh air." If you don't like grass, and must Internet, he is on LinkedIn.

Mentions:

• Jason Yee on LinkedIn.
• DevOpsDays Portland, September 8-10, back for the first time since 2021.
• Every DevOpsDays, on a map.
• John Allspaw and Paul Hammond, "10+ Deploys Per Day", the Velocity 2009 talk that comes up.

Special Guest: Jason Yee.

Episode Comments