MacDevOpsYVR

Last year I had the great opportunity to head up to the “Frozen North” to attend the fourth year of MacDevOpsYVR, and boy’o’boy did I enjoy myself! If you’re not privy to Canada’s airport codes, MDOYVR takes place in the coastal seaport city of Vancouver at Simon Fraser University (if you are planning on attending in 2019, you may want to brush-up on your Canadian airport codes; you’ll see why…). For the uninitiated, MacDevOpsYVR is an “annual conference for Mac Admins interested in integrating DevOps into their IT practice.”

But what does that really mean?

The conference is one-size-fits-all insofar that MacAdmins of any flavor/skillset can walk away having learned something (or, if nothing else, someone) new. From highly technical deep-dives such as resident Mac-troll Joel Rennich’s “Ruminations on tokens, both secure and insecure”, to talks on growth like Meg Ciliberti’s “Learning to Swim”; suffice it to say, it would be hard to attend this conference and not come out of it feeling refreshed, inspired, and most importantly, not alone in the daily IT trials and tribulations.

This year’s docket

Looking forward five months, there will be some really great speakers at the 2019 conference which I am quite excited to hear chat. One aspect of the speaker lineup that I really like is the variety of backgrounds from which the presenters come from. For instance, this year there are folks from Fleetsmith (paid solution for Mac device management), MunkiReport (you guessed it… an open-source Munki reporting tool), PostLab (media post-production lab), as well as Sarah Edwards (who focuses on forensic engineering on Apple devices). Clearly, a wide variety of industries is represented, and there is something for everyone.

Coming from a film/video background, I’m especially excited to hear Jasper Siegers chat about PostLab’s use of GitLab for version control of Final Cut libraries (something they surely didn’t teach me about in film school!). It is diverse topics like these that make MacDevOpsYVR a great time to learn more about the kind of obstacles that the entire MacAdmins community face (not just those that closely align with one’s own daily hurdles).

And not to mention… Look at how cool those conference badges are!