Hi, I’m Paul. I’m a huge fan of community work. Despite the lack of pay, there’s huge reward in helping people help others in a generative and generally positive way. I’ve been witness to the effect that OpenAPI, Selenium/WebDriver, and other collaborative technologies have had on a global audience, practitioner, business, vendor, and other less recognizable standards (yet).
That’s why I’m hosting Observe 20/20 Boston on April 6th. There are dozens of organizations in Boston that will benefit from this day of workshops and presentations that focus solely on observability. So far, we already have a great lineup and sponsors are coming in from all sorts of angles (contributors, implementers, product teams, hiring/recruiting, etc.), including:
- Liz Fong-Jones – Honeycomb.io
- Austin Parker – LightStep
- Dave McAllister – SignalFx
- Daniel Khan – Dynatrace
- Lucy Monahan – Toast Labs
- Yoshi Yamaguchi – Google
- Steve Flanders – Splunk
- Marc Zbyszynski – GCP Applied Technologies
- Ronald McCollam – Graphana Labs
- Mark Henderson – Haja Networks
- Amongst others…
In tech, it’s rare when an open-source project truly embodies the values of openness and forward-thinking that the CNCF OpenTelemetry project has to-date. Their surprising level of alignment through multiple meetings per week, transparency through said meeting notes and git commits, camaraderie across vendors and commercial interests, and the consolidation of OpenCensus and OpenTracing groups into a single, concise articulation of how to build-in observability (a.k.a. “o11y”) to complex and distributed systems is, frankly, astounding.
What’s Our Boston-local Response?
As a committed, rogue community organizer who’s deeply committed to the tribes I run with (e.g. Boston DevOps meetup, DevOpsDays Boston, SeConf, Droidcon, Swiftfest, MobileTea, Ministry-of-Testing and other communities), evidence of collaboration matters greatly to me. I’ve rolled up my sleeves to iterate over useful versions of “Open Spaces” at numerous events, and I’ve seen how important conversation and constructive dialog is to propel a topic as important as observability.
We on the organizing committee see it as an opportunity to observe who’s truly observant enough to understand the impact of a lack of visibility on business-critical signs of service health and reliability.
Which local DevOps/SRE leads are conscious enough to send their teams to an event that’s absurdly inexpensive and highly pertinent?
Which vendors are gutsy enough to talk-the-talk but AND walk-the-walk about their commitment to the OTel community?
In essence, how aware and observant is the Boston tech scene about a critical topic that most SFO startups realized years ago?
Bring Your Team to Observe 20/20!
We’ll see who’s got their heads up enough to see the observability train coming. Often, so many of us have our heads down and either miss critical thinking from others or forget to take a breath and look around for other options that the ones we currently have.
Observe 20/20 is a chance to do just that, breath, look around, and learn.
This is my hope for Boston tech…that we focus on truly impactful technologies and changes over temporary “nerd knobs” (as my partner calls them; living with me, there are plenty of those around). OTel and it’s community deserve our attention.
With very little time and effort, those who manage an engineering team or practice in Boston, there’s absolutely no excuse for not joining us. Tickets are very reasonable for training budgets:
For me, spending all the time and energy on logistics, covering the cost of venue, badges, and lunch, hundreds of emails, that’s all easy.
So it is your choice to be with us on April 6th! Come be part of the dialog.