On Sept 21st and 22nd, 2017, 330+ software practioners took over the Uptown Theater in Kansas City Missouri to discuss DevOps at DevOpsDays KC
You can check out a recap here:
DevOpsDays Kansas City 2017 was held at the Uptown Theater at 3700 Broadway, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Uptown Theater was home to performances by Sting, Jason Bonham, Henry Rollins, Cyndi Lauper, Garbage, Sarah Silverman, Lyle Lovett, Dwight Yoakum, Ben Folds, Third Eye Blind, Melissa Etheridge, OK GO, Rusted Root, Elvis Costello, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn and many others over the last few years. So it was a great experience for our speakers to take this stage.
Having access to such a beautiful theater, we had a theme of “The Roles We Play” over the course of the 2 day event.
We had over 350 people register for the conference, 334 of which checked in at the door.
25 speakers (compared to 16 in 2016) were chosen from 143 submissions (compared to 64 in 2016). This made a lot of tough decisions for the speaker committee. During the conference, attendees were able to provide a +1, 0, -1 rating for each talk as a feedback mechanism to the speakers. With over 400 feedback slips, our speakers received about 80% positive feedback and only 6% that did not meet expectations. All of the slides and videos can be found embedded in the pages for each session from the program for the event.
In the afternoon, we handed the conference over to the attendees to have Open Space discussions on topics of their own choosing.
We had on-site t-shirt printing provided by Seen Merch and a coffee bar provided by Messenger Coffee.
The food was a hit. We had BBQ from Kansas City Joe’s and a taco bar from McGonigles. Both local favorites.
We were able to gather survey results in the days immediately following the event. We had 84 responses. Of those, 87% would recommend this event to a friend or colleague (8 or higher out of 10).
We of course could not have put on such an awesome event all of our awesome without our sponsors.
Thank you to everyone involved in this experience! See you on Slack and at the local devops meetup!
The videos of Day One, videos of Day Two and slides of all talks are linked on our program.
2016 Kansas City Organizers:
(left to right):
Tom Martin, Ryan McNair, Jeff Stephens, Chris Stein, Chase Pettet, Dan Barker, CJ Obermaier, Rebecca Sowers, Caleb Hyde, Bert Weidt, Aaron Blythe