Dead or Alive, Who Would you Like to Eat Dinner / Drink / Code / Compare War Stories with? The DevOps Community Weighs-in!

Written by: Electric Bee

September 14, 2015

1 min read

DevOps is, at its core, a meeting of the minds. A shared understanding, and a shared culture - a Geist - that empowers all of us to do great things! When we first set out to plan this year's DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES15) - we wanted to bring together some of the best minds in the industry for 3 packed days of all-things-DevOps -- so that we can all share, learn, and get better - together. DOES15, happening next month, now boasts an impressive lineup of over 70 speakers from all around the DevOps community. These are software experts, practitioners and thought leaders from Fortune 1,000 brands who will share practical approaches on how DevOps and Continuous Delivery drive value to customers and enterprise IT users alike. As we were developing the content for the conference, we asked our esteemed speakers some tough questions: We asked them to share with us their particular challenges implementing DevOps in some of the most complex enterprises in the world; sharing their failures; their triumphs; their lessons learned and patterns for success; and where they, too, need help. We - also - asked them to weigh in on other important stuff, for example which other great minds they wish they could hang with: Dead or alive, who would you like to eat dinner / drink / code / compare war stories with? Below is a sample of the answers from some of our speakers (if you run into them at the conference- here's a great conversation starter for you!). We invite you to weigh in too, on Twitter (using #DOES15) or in the comments below.

Carmen DeArdo DevOps Technology Leader, Nationwide Insurance edward-deming

"From an IT perspective, it has to be Deming ."

Charles Nelles Director, IT Operational Support, Western Union "Douglas Adams , only book I ever read to make me laugh out loud, almost hysterically in a public place. I would love to spend an evening at a pub with him."

Chivas Nambiar Director – Systems Engineering, Verizon lopp

"Michael Lopp (@rands) and Joel Spolsky "

Dominic Faraone Software Engineer, CenturyLink

"Benjamin Franklin "

Dominica DeGrandis Director of Learning & Development, LeanKit elanor-r

"Eleanor Roosevelt "

Eric Passmore Head of Software Engineering, MSN "Ulysses S. Grant - I think he could relate to me, we both like to get the job done"

Erica Morrison Senior Manager Software Development, CSG International "Peyton Manning "

Evelijn Van Leeuwen Manager Management & Support Service, ING edward-deming

"Edward Deming , specially about the red bead experiment, and poor management practices. Together with Frederick Taylor ."

Jan-Joost Bouwman Enterprise Process Owner Change Management, ING "Ricardo Semler - his ideas about empowering employees are really inspiring. I would like to talk to him how we can use those ideas to make DevOps even more awesome."

Jim Stoneham Former VP, Yahoo! Communities dave-goldberg

"Dave Goldberg (CEO, SurveyMonkey), who recently prematurely left us. I'd met him a few times, and he is one of the most thoughtful leaders I know of. "

Joshua Corman CTO, Sonatype "Authors Kurt Vonnegut and Neil Gaiman "

Kevina Finn-Braun Director of Site Reliability Services, Salesforce "Marc Benioff -he just seems like a very interesting person."

Kris Buytaert CTO, Inuits.eu orwell

"George Orwell "

Lucas Gravley Build Architect, HP "Jam session with Alkaline trio. Great musicians and would love to play music and relax with them"

Manish Aggarwal Software Engineer, Intel obama

"Barack Obama. "

Manuel Edwards Systems Engineering Manager, E*TRADE carl-sagan

"Dinner: Carl Sagan ; Drink: Ernest Hemingway ; Code: Alan Turing ; War stories: Tim O'Brien (author of The Things They Carried)"

Mike Bland Practice Director, 18F (General Services Administration) "Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon ."

Mirco Hering Agile & DevOps Lead, Accenture douglas-adams

"Douglas Adams - intelligent and funny, after a few scotch it must be a blast talking to him. Shame i never got to meet him."

Neil Manvar Solutions Architect, Sauce Labs, Inc jason-huggins

"Jason Huggins - inventor of Selenium"

Olivier Jacques CI, CD, DevOps Practitioner, HP Enterprise Group sheldon

"Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory. Bazinga!"

Paul Schmid IT Manager – Solution Delivery, Sherwin-Williams steve-jobs

"Steve Jobs , mostly cause we share the same personality type (ENTJ), and I would love to talk to him about our shared passion of innovation and driving change."

Paula Thrasher Application Delivery Lead, CSC "Author/Computer Scientist Jaron Lanier . He is writing some of the most thought provoking commentary on the IT revolution these days. Also Tim Schafer of DoubleFine, I was a backer of DoubleFine Adventure (aka Broken Age) and the documentary was worth the backer price alone. Its like a peek into the secret career of a video game developer, which turns out to be just as tricky as regular old software development."

Ramona Jackson Director IT, Cisco steve-jobs

"Steve Jobs, Mark Cuban, Tiger Woods "

Scott Prugh Chief Architect, CSG International "I have always loved Guy Fieri . He knows a ton about delicious food but more importantly, he always makes people feel special."