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ChefConf CFP: Delivering Delight, Doing Change, and All the Other Interesting Stuff

Mandi Walls | Posted on | ChefConf | community

ChefConf 2019 will take place May 20-23 in Seattle, Washington, and we want you to present!

ChefConf is the largest community gathering and educational event for teams on the journey to becoming fast, efficient, and innovative software-driven organizations. We are proud of the role this event plays in giving community members a chance to share their stories and best practices with their peers to help move forward the entire DevOps community.

We’ve shared some ideas to hopefully spark your thinking about submissions for our other tracks, and this post will give you some ideas for the final two “official” tracks, as well as, well, whatever else you think our community might find interesting.

Delivering Delight

Continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment are all about delivering value throughout the software development lifecycle. Our organizations strive to create new innovations faster and more frequently without compromising on quality. We want to delight our customers, surpass their expectations, and find out how best to meet their needs. So how does your team know what to deliver? How do you focus and prioritize? How have you changed or grown your tech ecosystem to meet the needs of your customers? Many organizations are looking at these questions and searching for answers. Have you been there? What can you tell us?

  • How do you know what your customers want? How do you track the impact of new features?
  • What’s surprised you about focusing on customer delight?
  • Tell us about your toolchain. What’s worked best for you to get delightful features in the hands of customers most effectively?
  • Have you had to reorganize teams to give appropriate focus to delightful priorities? Has your organization or culture changed significantly?
  • How has your organization prioritized which projects to continuously deliver?

Doing Change

Last year’s ChefConf tagline was “Do Change”. The world outside of tech is definitely changing, and some shifts are being felt by technical teams. Has your team pursued a new avenue in the search for change? Are you thinking about the triple bottom line – the social, environmental, and financial impacts and goals of your organization? We want to know what you’re doing to become the most ambitious and future-focused version of you out in the world.

  • Is your organization participating in outreach programs for underserved and underrepresented communities in tech?
  • Has your organization looked at the eco impacts of your systems? Did you reap a big power savings from an upgrade or migration?
  • How are you taking care of your people, their mental and physical health?
  • Does your organization have projects focusing on services for the bottom of the pyramid? How do those projects fit into your overall priorities and business portfolio?

Don’t Label Me!

We know that Chef, InSpec, and Habitat are pieces of a technical ecosystem that reaches out into developer practices, deployment methods, compliance and governance, and so many other interesting topics. What else are you plugging into your workflows? Tell us all about it!

  • Metrics and monitoring in distributed systems.
  • Career growth and change experiences.
  • Accessibility, UX in tools for techies.
  • Continuously delivering documentation.
  • Plugging serverless functions into your topology.
  • Surprise us!

Your story and experiences are worth sharing with the community. Help others learn and further your own knowledge through sharing. The ChefConf CFP is open now. Use some of the questions posed here to help form a talk proposal for these tracks and the rest:

Submit your talk proposal now! The deadline is Friday, January 11, 2019 at 11:59 PM Pacific time.