DevSecCon Singapore Survey Results and Trip Recap

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to get to fly to Singapore, meet my colleagues there in person, and to attend DevSecCon Singapore as a sponsor. For those unable to attend, here are the presentation slides from the 2-day event, and here are 3 takeaways from my colleague Keiichiro Nozaki.

As you hopefully know by now, community is near and dear to the entire DevCentral team, and we are super-excited at growing our offline engagement. There were 227 attendees from all over Asia (plus a few from Europe and North America), and everyone was highly engaged in content, conversation, and connecting. Working with the organizers of this international conference was a pleasure, and it is rejuvenating to meet like-minded folks who believe in the importance of sharing knowledge (rather than sharing sales/marketing pitches). F5 had such a great time, we’re already looking forward to DevSecCon Seattle (September 16-17, 2019)!

Here are some of the F5 crew who supported the conference:

Instead of sponsoring live captioning for this event, we provided diversity scholarship attendance. Diversity and inclusion are so important to the F5 culture, and it was a pleasure to meet these young professionals, and we hope to see them again at a future event (and maybe also in a recruiter’s inbox).

Here’s what our table looked like:

The robots and stickers were a hit, and folks liked how comfy our shirts are. We also gave away a $100SGD Harvey Norman gift card each day, and gave out 8 spot-prizes to folks who wore our Nerd Life t-shirt on Day 2 (Starbucks gift cards, since we’re based in Seattle… and most of us run on caffeine). Here are the first two winners of the spot-prizes:

For those of you who weren’t there, the Pebble survey is our way of better-understanding what challenges are at the top of attendees’ minds. In exchange for telling us if they were more on the DEV side, more on the SEC side, or OTHER, attendees got 3 pebbles of their corresponding color to vote on pain points/challenges. All 3 votes could go into a single jar or be spread out across 2 or 3 jars.

As promised, here are the Pebble survey results (with a hearty thank-you to the nearly 40% of attendees - who participated).

 

Highlighted are each persona’s top answer and the most popular answer of the four available. As you can see, most respondents self-identified as being on the Sec side of DevSec. We were unsurprised that 2 out of the 3 surveyed grounds found organizational silos to be the biggest challenge, somewhat at odds with the dev side of the house. So, what can we collectively do to help improve cultural issues within the devops world? I’d love to see some discussion in the replies below.

Robert Haynes will be writing a series of articles addressing the pain points listed above, and discussing some ways to get around/over those challenges. I’ll update this post with links as they get published, but you’ll probably see them better if you follow his Twitter account. Stay tuned!

On a personal note, I’d like to sincerely thank all the many people who helped my jet-lagged self function at this event (surprise caffeine is wonderful caffeine), the many people who helped make the event friendly, accessible, and useful, and the table of near-strangers who welcomed me with open arms just after the conference ended by offering food, and pouring me the last beer from their pitcher before we decided to enjoy the view from a rooftop (photo below). I can’t state strongly enough how much I love good community, regardless of where in the world it manifests. Shared food and drink has always struck me as the most fundamental level on which people can bond, and doing so after 2 days of sharing thoughts and conversations at the technical event was a treat.

It was my first time at this event, and I had a great time with the wonderful folks who were there – from the organizers who did a fantastic job, to the attendees to our fellow sponsors - everyone was passionate about learning and sharing knowledge. I know we’re all looking forward to the next community conference, and hoping to see you on the road.

See you soon!