'Devops' and 'open source' - I was there.

Today I remembered that I was actually present in San José, at the 1997 Perl Conference, when Eric S. Raymond presented his fetchmail experiment in his talk/paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which more or less introduced the term open source.

This was quite a well attended conference with a couple of hundred people.

Another critical conference that I attended was the very first devopsdays in Ghent, back in 2009.  Originally focusing on the emerging movement around agile infrastructure, Patrick shortened the name to devops, stressing the importance of collaboration.

The lessons here?

1. There's only so much you can do alone.

2. Increase your network.

3. devops wouldn't be here without open source.