DevOps and .Net Conference

So I just tweeted the following,

Firstly, I’d like to say that this is not about naming and shaming. Secondly, I am not annoyed with the conference at all about the response. The conference I spoke to advertises itself as “engineering talks only” so I wanted to post a few things about that.

In my opinion, the writing of code and the ecosystem of a specific platform is only 10% (or rather a small portion) of what we need to be aware of as software engineers. I am a software developer who works in the infrastructure / ops world now. When I was writing application only code, I was not involved in understanding the entire ecosystem of the software I was working on. In hindsight, I really feel I missed out by not being part of it. Since being part of the infrastructure world, I feel it has actually helped me develop better & more robust software.

Organising conferences is a huge amount of work and is, frankly, hard. I understand that conferences cannot cater for every part of an ecosystem. One thing I do think conferences should do, is to strive to make developers better. DevOps, Continuous Delivery and Infrastructure are / should be things that we, as developers, care about. To dismiss these style of topics from a conference that advertises for “engineering talks only” can help to hinder developers from delivering the best products they can. It may not also make developers understand the importance of software being in production and making money

Food for thought…