CloudDevDay wrapup and missing snark

I went to Detroit CloudDevDay today, and overall it was great. Compuware building downtown Detroit? Fucking awesome. The views from the 15th floor are sweet – they have a wrap-around balcony and you can see across the Detroit River, and some great architecture (like the Guardian building – if you get a chance, go there. Srsly awesome. Here’s my flickr set of it, and some PeopleMover stations too – http://flic.kr/s/aHsjuVwoWk .)

So for the snark of CloudDevDay before my phone died, see my Twitter stream (and that of @echodave – he was on a roll). I was, as is evidenced by my tweets, not pleased with the keynote speaker. I was even less pleased when his keynote ran over, and the first session I was excited to attend was cancelled because of it. So, he worked for Amazon. And he didn’t mention (voluntarily) the huge outage. Even throughout the whole “Step 1: Plan for failure” part of his talk. Dave (@echodave) was ballsy enough to ask if a “lessons learned” thing would be covered at any time…. The rest of his presentation was filled with moments where I was thinking (or saying, or tweeting) WTF. It ended in a sales pitch, with him explaining pricing. Yeah. Not happy about that one.

The second presentation I went to was Cloud Performance with CloudSleuth, presented by Doug Willoughby. It was pretty cool – cloudsleuth.net is actually really slick. I didn’t tweet much through it, because it was interesting… then Dave mentioned a Cialis commercial, and someone else said “pulling out” and I lost it. But yeah, CloudSleuth is pretty fucking sweet. It’s a free tool that gives response time from various cloud service providers, provided by Compuware. Cool visualizations, good data…

Then it was lunch time. David McKinnon (an organizer) made sure I got some gluten-free food. It was a delicious salad with chicken, portobello mushrooms, the usual veggies, and a creamy balsamic vinaigrette. Fantastic! Had a game of Monty Python Fluxx with some friends (*waves* hi Onorio and Patrick!) that was cut short. Boo. I was totally gonna win (not really).

Then there was a panel discussions, with some good stuff. That’s about when my phone was dying. I don’t have many notes on that one, except the following:

• if you’re looking for a cloud provider, cover your own ass with provider redundancy – get several different providers
• if you treat the customer data/transation as if it’s yours, quality/security will improve (think this applies to all development, not just cloud)

 

The next session I attended was DevOps with @markstanislav. Srsly good talk there. I really wish my phone wasn’t dead, ’cause I’d have tweeted things to remember/follow from this one (no snark! it’s a miracle!). First and foremost, DevOps is going beyond the job title (“well, that’s not my job” bullshit, as I remember Mark saying…). The only other thing I wrote down is the 5th floor scenario – if you throw any one server (or sysadmin!) off the roof, will your whole infrastructure go down? Run your teams with that in mind. I need to check out Mark’s website – DevOps is a great concept (infrastructure as code with Puppet, for one). His website is uncompiled.com – he said he’d have resources there, so I’d check it out if you’re interested in integrated development and operations teams (if you’re not, you’re dumb. just sayin’…)

The next session I went to was… painful, to say the least. I feel bad for the presenter… Just a few notes for the guy:

• when doing a presentation, and you know you’re going to use your browser, maybe close a few of your tabs in Chrome. I counted, and you had 30 open. THIRTY. In one window. Wow…
• when navigating in your demo from a trackpad, please be aware of the fact that the audience will follow the mouse pointer. When you make the cursor go all over the damn place, I can’t be held responsible for throwing up all over the guy in front of me. Srsly *hurk*
• people are leaving your presentation pretty quickly. Not the best feeling, I know. But calling it out? Saying, and I quote, “I’m not offended, by the way, of people walking out if you want to join them.” Are the rest of us staying out of pity? Hard to say at this point.
• when taking questions from the audience, please let the audience member finish their question. If the rest of the audience doesn’t know what that person was going to say, and you do (’cause you’re psychic, duh), it’s polite to at least let them finish…

Final presentation? Brian Prince on cloud patterns and scenarios. This guy? Helluva entertaining speaker. His slide deck is an epic deck of awesome. IDK if I’m seeing the same presentation Wednesday at the MIGANG meeting or not. Even if so, the guy’s srsly entertaining. And I won his book (autographed, natch) on Azure.

All in all, a great DevDay. Detroit Cloud and Detroit Java groups are awesome for pulling it together. Also? Dtown is where it’s at, people. The views from that balcony were great! Well… most of ’em… there was that office chair on the rooftop to the northeast that had me intrigued…