This year, I had the opportunity to attend and volunteered DevConf.us for the first time.
DevConf.us is an annual and free community conference for developers, DevOps engineers, testers, documentation writers and all the other contributors to open-source. The event typically covers a wide range of topics, including cloud computing, Linux, containerization, CI/CD, DevSecOps, open-source software development and Artificial Intelligence. One of the goals of the conference is to create connections between open source contributors, to share knowledge and to bring people closer to the open source world.
The conference was hosted by Boston University at the George Sherman Union (GSU), a great location with several conference rooms and a food court, located at the center of the Boston University campus.
Since I’m a Software Engineer Intern at Red Hat working remotely, I had the opportunity to meet my peers, in person. That’s because many Red Hatters attended the conference and many of them were also speakers.
Working at Red Hat made me find out of the need of volunteers by the organization, hence, I signed up for some hours as a volunteer. Helping people and meeting making other wonderful connections, was a really fun and rewarding experience.
When I was not volunteering, I attended several talks. Unfortunately, some of the talks were overlapping since they were at the same time but in different conference rooms, so I had to pick one of them.
The day 1 started with a very interesting talk by Kelsey Hightower which is a well-known figure in the software engineering and cloud computing community, particularly recognized for his contributions to Kubernetes, cloud-native technologies, and DevOps practices. He talked about open source and his experience on IT field with many anecdotes of his life.
Since I enjoy the IT world horizontally, I was interested in many topics that were covered in the conference : LLMs, kubernetes, podman, containerization, security, etc.
With the advent of AI and LLMs, there were many talks regarding this topic. An interesting talk was “Who Watches the Watchmen? Understanding LLM Benchmark Quality” from Erik Elardson where he talked about different way of benchmarking with a interesting point of view.
I had the chance to learn about tools and techniques that I will definitely explore. An example is podman quadlets that is a tool that hides the complexity of running containers under systemd to make it easier to maintain unit files written from scratch. I was interested to migrate some of my docker-compose YAML to quadlets so – at the end of the talk – I asked if that was something possible. It looks like there are no tools at the moment.
If you are interested on see the agenda of the conference, with all the slides, a devconf.us website is available at https://www.devconf.info/us/schedule/ .
I had the honor to have the book “Podman in action” signed from its author Daniel Walsh. I will probably “eat” the book in a couple of weeks!
But Devconf.us was not just about talks…it was also party!
The organization, organized a very cool party at Bleacher Bar where drinks and food were served. It was another chance to meet other workers in the field, make new friends, and to enjoy the night all together.
It was a wonderful experience and I’ll definitely attend the next DevConf.us !