I gave a talk at the DevOpsDays conference the other day!

Devopsdays

I recently gave a talk at the 3rd annual DevOpsDays Cape Town conference which was held at Woodstock, Cape Town on 20-21 September 2018. Devopsdays is a worldwide series of technical conferences covering topics of software development, IT infrastructure operations, and the intersection between them. Each event is run by volunteers from the local area.

First of all I would like to give thanks to the organizers, volunteers and sponsors:

My Talk

Being an introvert has it’s challenges, and one of the challenges I have is public speaking. Obviously to overcome those challenges, one has to face them head on. So after hearing about the DevOpsDays Conferences at the previous Cape Town DevOps Meetup that I attended, I was like - Mpho you must submit my talk.

Fortunately, the organizers at the @devopsdayscpt liked my talk submission and they gave me the opportunity to tell the world my story.

Talk: Automated Qualification Testing for the 64 Antennas MeerKAT Correlator-Beamformer

@JoeNuspl gave me this piece of advice, before I hit the lectern and he said “Just remember, you’re paid to be an engineer not a public speaker. Focus on content and tell your story.”, So below is my story.

My talk abstract, and conference program can be found on Link.

If you have any interests on the presentation, see below slides.

DevOpsDays Cape Town 2018 - Full Videos

The conference was streamed on YouTube and it is available to watch.

My Talk: Automated Qualification Testing for the 64 Antennas MeerKAT Correlator-Beamformer

Initially, I planned to include a demo but had technical issues - I will upload the demo on a later stage as it forms part of the series, How I configured Jenkins CI server in a Docker container.

Demo

I have since, created a demo - it would have been cool to have done this during the talk. Demo

Conclusion

The overall experience was Amazing! the event was very well organised (Thanks to the organizers), great talks, great people, great food and great beer!. It was my second official talk given and I think I did well if I say so myself (Could improve), definitely not my last. Not being a people’s person has it’s challenges ie I didn’t meet as many people as I had hoped I would, but hoping to make new friends at the next meetup or conference.

My only advice would be, if this is something that interests you then get yourself involved with the meetup’s and the DevOps community, I highly recommend joining the Cape Town DevOps Meetup and the ZATech Slack Chat.

I’ll leave you with two of my favourite quotes.

  • “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do” ― Steve Jobs
  • “Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints!” ― Chief Si ahl