Contributed by Tracy Ragan, CDF Governing Board Member
Continuous Delivery Champions were celebrated at cdCon 2020, the first conference dedicated to continuous delivery held virtually on October 7 and 8. I attended the event with somewhat low expectations. After all, the first Jenkins World was far smaller than what it has turned into, DevOps World. By the time the first few hours passed, I realized this show was unique, grassroots and held nuggets of information from continuous delivery champions from all over the globe. From chatting with project contributors at BOFs, hearing from end users during the end-user council panel discussion and listening to a variety of break out sessions on Jenkins, Spinnaker, Tekton, Screwdriver, and Jenkins X, this event became a big celebration of all people who are devoted to the implementation and ongoing evolution of continuous delivery practices and tools.
‘Unique’ is really the best description of how this show came together. First, women showed up. That alone makes it stand out. Keynotes from Abby Kearns, Edith Harbaugh and Zainab Abubakar really made this show special. It was so refreshing to celebrate women who have earned their seat at the table.
And it got even better as the breakouts got going. Close to 40% of the breakout sessions were held by women who are continuous delivery champions. As a woman in technology, seeing my female peers was inspiring, encouraging and so very welcome.
Another unique aspect of this show was the type and topic of the breakout sessions. Having contributors from 5 different open source projects present sessions at one collaborative event gave me a broad perspective of how CD is being approached differently across the projects. This broader perspective is missed at ‘vendor’ organized events where a single method is the focus. And this broad perspective created lots of room for conversation in the BOF sessions.
The platform ‘Hopin’ was used to manage the event. Hopin offers a networking option, like speed dating, giving attendees the opportunity to be randomly matched with other attendees. For those of us brave enough to try out the feature, we had lots of grins and giggles as we got our 3 minutes to make introductions. In some cases, we just exchanged LinkedIn and Twitter handles for further discussions.
The platform also offered vendor ‘booths’ that had a simple front panel for a demo, or live zoom session. I personally enjoyed being able to visit booths and watch a video in the privacy of my own office without having to talk to someone. And if I wanted to, a simple chat session was there to use.
I am sure cdCon 2021 will build upon the success of cdCon 2020. I am looking forward to seeing how this conference, dedicated to celebrating Continuous Delivery Champions, will grow in the coming years. As we move away from monolithic practices to microservices and cloud-native architecture, the continuous delivery pipeline will shift and change. I cannot think of a better way of sharing information, meeting peers and getting questions addressed. Great job CDF. See you next year at cdCon 2021.
About the Author
Tracy is CEO and Co-Founder of DeployHub. DeployHub is the first microservice management platform designed to facilitate the sharing, relationship mapping and deployments of microservices. Tracy is an expert in configuration management and pipeline life cycle practices with a hyper-focus on microservices and cloud-native architecture. She currently serves as a board member of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) where she is the elected General Member Representative.
