app01 Thu, 03 Sep 2026 01:26:06 +0000 Fireside (https://fireside.fm) Software Defined Interviews - Episodes Tagged with “Conferences” https://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/tags/conferences Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:00:00 +0200 Deep discussions about technology, enterprise IT, and the like en-us episodic Deep discussions about technology, enterprise IT, and the like Software Defined Talk Deep discussions about technology, enterprise IT, and the like yes Software Defined Talk softwaredefinedinterviews@cote.wtf Episode 126: DevOpsDays, Technical Storytelling, and Loading the Dishwasher, with Jason Yee https://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/126 8443b81d-88ac-4957-9971-75f56c7dab2a Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:00:00 +0200 Software Defined Talk 126 DevOpsDays, Technical Storytelling, and Loading the Dishwasher, with Jason Yee full Software Defined Talk Jason Yee has two jobs that turn out to be the same job - Staff Technical Advocate at Datadog, and one of three global co-chairs of DevOpsDays - and both are about getting other people to talk. How the DevOpsDays machine actually runs, what sponsorship looks like now that DevOps is mature rather than hot, and why the sponsors doing well have stopped counting leads and started running workshops. 1:05:03 yes <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p><a href="https://devopsdays.org/events/2026-portland-or/welcome/" rel="nofollow noopener">DevOpsDays Portland</a> is back for the first time since 2021, September 8 through 10, with Whitney giving both a workshop and a talk.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Mentions:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/gitbisect/" rel="nofollow noopener">Jason Yee on LinkedIn</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://devopsdays.org/events/2026-portland-or/" rel="nofollow noopener">DevOpsDays Portland</a>, September 8-10, back for the first time since 2021.</li> <li><a href="https://devopsdays.org/events" rel="nofollow noopener">Every DevOpsDays, on a map</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOe18KhtT4" rel="nofollow noopener">John Allspaw and Paul Hammond, "10+ Deploys Per Day"</a>, the Velocity 2009 talk that comes up.</li> </ul> <p>Special Guest: Jason Yee. Special Guest: Jason Yee.</p> Jason Yee, Datadog, DevOpsDays, DevOpsDays Portland, DevOpsDays Amsterdam, global co-chair, conference organizing, conference sponsorship, sponsorship KPIs, lead generation, workshops, Ignite talks, open spaces, unconference, technical storytelling, developer advocacy, developer relations, ghostwriting, blank page problem, call for papers, speaker coaching, executive communications, product marketing, John Allspaw, blameless postmortem, safety science, resilience engineering, University of Lund, 10 deploys a day, Velocity, systems thinking, Thinking in Systems, DevOps, platform engineering, Portland, Portlandia, community conferences, volunteer organizing, code of conduct, introverts, dishwasher loading 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:

Special Guest: Jason Yee.

Special Guest: Jason Yee.

]]> 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:

Special Guest: Jason Yee.

Special Guest: Jason Yee.

]]>