It's the 3rd Edition of DevOps/DSC Camp in sunny not-on-the-Strip Las Vegas! We're coming together again for a long weekend of deep discussions, practical advice, real-world demonstrations, and more. Don't call it a conference - this is a close-knit working group of real practitioners, sharing information and creating standards and practices. Note that hotel is not included this year (hence the slightly lower price), so you are on your own recognizance for booking a hotel room, ideally at the Hilton Garden Inn Las Vegas Strip South. There's also a Hawthorne Suites and a Residence Inn right nearby (walking distance).

The Agenda-ish

We keep it pretty loose, but here's the basic framework:

Thurday evening we'll kick things off with cocktails, and probably a trip out to nearby Town Square for dinner. Renew old acquaintences and get into the groove for the weekend!

Friday is a half-day workshop in the morning (breakfast included), followed by small-group discussions throughout the afternoon, including BBQ, at Don's house. There'll be plenty of pool time, a "salad bar" lunch, a torpedo or two of local beer, and a lot of technical conversation. We wrap around 8pm, although many campers take the opportunity to experience the Strip for the night.

Saturday is a full day of workshopping. We'll have breakfast and lunch at the hotel, and in the evening we'll head out to do something fun. In previous years, we've gone bar-hopping in up-and-coming Fremont East, experienced all The LINQ has to offer, and more.

Sunday is typically a full day, too, often consisting of a half-day of workshops and a half-day of Microsoft product team engagement. That's a little TBD right now. We will offer breakfast, and usually lunch, at the hotel.

All alumni are expected to offer a ~1h presentation topic, which they will lead, via the alumni Slack team. You can give a talk, a demo, lead a discussion, or whatever. Use the #camp-event channel.

We're starting to preview Camp topics at DonJones.com, every Tuesday morning.

Is Camp Right for You?

Maybe. You need to be basically bipedal, and have a steady pulse. You should also be working with PowerShell and DSC in production in some form, and you should be at least agitating to bring DevOps into the lives of your family and coworkers. You should enjoy eating, and you should be comfortable in small groups of other technoverts. Technology should be your career, not just your job, and you should have a burning desire not just to learn, but to help forward the state of the art when it comes to practicing DevOps in a Microsoft-centric universe. You should not be entry-level, and you should at least recognize what "imposter syndrome" is, in case you have it. Your mantra should be, "I might be dumb, but I'm no dumber than anyone else here, although I might be differently dumb." Being smart is also totally cool. Core PowerShell stuff - writing advanced functions, for example - should be well within your wheelhouse. If you don't drive a boat for a living, then it should be well within your core competencies.

Some Notes

We don't record "sessions" because there are no sessions. This is a working group - it's all conversations, loosely aligned to a rough topical schedule, some of which we make up on the fly. Many of our learnings are assembled and published on TheDevOpsCollective.org sometime after Camp concludes. We also don't live-stream. This is a working group of in-person colleagues, not an MVA for you to passively consume.