Firstly we need to say a massive thank you to the community and the subject matter experts that helped put together the 2023 edition of #90DaysOfDevOps
I really appreciate the effort that was put into this years project, the aim for the year was to raise awareness of security when it comes to DevSecOps and also then to continue the DevOps journey through some of the areas that we could not cover in 2022.
I also appreciate the community at large that have translated and fixed issues throughout the 2022 and 2023 edition.
The whole premise of this project started with just me taking notes which then seemingly helped a lot of people with a structured approach to learning the concept of DevOps and DevSecOps. The project provides a big picture, some theory and tooling options available, with a conclusion of getting hands on and walking through a pin pointed scenario.
All of this is great but I want to take a look at some of the areas throughout the project, then I would like to take a view on the project health overall finishing up on what's next.
I had to take a step back and let the SMEs take control of their subjects. This was a challenge to give up some of that control. But honestly I would not have been able to commit to another 90 days and the committment to learn some very untouched areas especially the security areas.
The next challenge was being able to stick to the strict guidelines of being able to submit content everyday throughout the 3 months. Most people were able to achieve this but some understandable had challenges and had to balance this around their day jobs.
We also got some insight that some big tech firms are using the repository as part of their onboarding it seems which is great, as it is a resource to help the community. When vendors take this though and use it officially my ask is to give back, i am not asking for money but there are many ways a company can help this community. Please contact me if this is the case to speak about possible ways to help this commhnity.
As we wrap up this years challenge, Its time to reflect on the year and if this worked or continued to help the community, the discord server has over 1200 people but it's not an active place with lot's of chat, questions and feedback. The second thing is we are over 23,000 GitHub stars as well and whilst this is amazing we have to compare 2022 with 2023 to work out success.
We also need feedback from you?
To continue the reflection section and looking at the project overall, I believe we have a healthy list of issues and PRs that are generally closed and resolved in a timely manner.
We have discussion boards on the repository as well where suggestions can be made on topics or the what else should we cover? I believe Microsoft and GitHub have an overarching problem to solve when it comes to discussions as they are not the active communities they potentially should be for feedback and discussions.
There was also the launch of the website which currently serves the 2022 project but needs to be updated to serve the 2023 project also and beyond. We will work on this.
I have had some thoughts around how the content is delivered, written content seems to work for some but think there is a lot of folks out there that would prefer video content. I need to find the time to walk through the 180 days and create videos for YouTube.
The final thing to add to this section is how amazed I have been to be invited and accepted to talk about the project at various conferences both small, large and community settings. This has enabled the reach to be further and into new communities.
Where do we go next?
I have some ideas for 2024, I would really like to include even more community members at different stages of their learning journey into DevOps. I would like to make the project more accessible and not just written content.
I am actually thinking of creating a Call for Papers and selecting 90 submissions and then releasing them during the first 3 months of 2024.
I also have the idea to speak to open source project owners and even some vendors about freemium and community editions of software that might want to share a blog or a series for this project out of the 90 days at the start of the year.
It would be great to get feedback on that and also very good to see if people made it this far.
I am also going to be carrying on and starting some new projects. These projects won't be time contrained not that 2023 was in the end.
Project Pace - Part of my role at Veeam Software is to show a number of demos of our software, project pace is my way to automate the build of environments for different talk tracks and demos, documenting them in public for everyone to use.
vZilla - This is where everything started for me, sharing with the community, this site will not go away but new content around DevOps, Cloud and Cloud-Native won't live here. Content here was always focused on Storage and Virtualisation but over recent years has also had some of the new content.
Up the Stack - Will be the new home for content, the first project to cover here will be looking into graduated and incubating projects on the CNCF landscape which is overwhelming and confusing.
Data on AWS - Another new project that I want to kick off, a focus on looking into AWS storage and then data services.
I also have an interest in learning more about databases after a great covering here in the 2023 edition I think there is a gap where we could educate the community better on all the different types of databases.
As you can see there is a lot going on, besides the day job and speaking to customers about the software we have available to protect data services.