DevOps Leadership Series 2015: Women & Diversity - a diversity of thought and contribution

Many of the leading minds and practitioners in the DevOps movement are women. I hope that comes as no surprise to you. DevOps has always embraced a diversity of thought and contribution. Case in point, close to 50% of the presenters at this year’s DevOps Days Boston event were women.

In this episode of the DevOps Leadership Series, we caught up with Jennifer Davis, co-author of Effective DevOps (O’Reilly 2015, $31) and software engineer at Chef. Jennifer discusses a greater diversification of what DevOps means. She sees more explicit efforts to expand DevOps into QA, security, DBAs, and other functional teams across the organization. Jennifer also discuss the benefit of re-setting one’s expectations on the meaning of certain words (e.g., agile, test driven development, audit driven development) to accelerate progress and remove roadblocks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-zONUI5KQ4

We then sat down with James Meickle, Site Reliability Engineer at Harvard and member of the organizing committee for DevOps Days Boston. James witnessed distinct growth over last year in the diversity of companies in attendance — both from a size and industry perspective. James also discusses the importance of diversity that the organizing committee insisted upon as they planned for the event. If you are organizing your own DevOps Days event, be sure to have a listen: