 Before we get started, I just noticed a couple of things. One, I think I'm the only male Ignite speaker. Two, I'm black, so that's a plus, and three, that's becoming less and less remarkable of a statement in this community. So that's awesome. All right. So now we're going to talk about Dungeons and Dragons. I was starting a group, and as I was putting together this Dungeons and Dragons group, I realized this is a lot like building a DevOps team. So I figured I'd talk about the similarities between the two. One, both of them require two essential roles. There's a dungeon master and there's a change agent. Without both of these things, neither of these activities survive. You need someone that's pushing change along and you need someone that's actually going to run the adventure. The jobs are similar between the two roles. You need to help build the team. You need to keep the momentum going when things start to falter, throwing a dragon every once in a while, and then you got to chart the course. Where are we headed? Where are we going? That's two important things. So when you're developing the party, the first thing you want to think about is you want to diversify your team. You ever have a group full of wizards and fighters and then someone gets cut and you're like, who the hell is going to heal us? It's the same thing in DevOps. You need to think about all of the different areas that people kind of need to be aware of. Now, you may not have an individual person for each role, but you can multi-class like in D&D. So you could be a fighter healer. Sure, you're sort of a shitty healer, but it's better than not having a healer at all. Same thing. Like, you may not be the best EVA, but it's better than nothing. The reason it's important though is because people view the problems that they're trying to solve based on their skills that they have, right? Whenever there's a problem in D&D, people look at their character sheet and they're like, what do I have? What do I have that can help? It's the same thing with people. They look at things and problems from their perspective. So everyone builds their character and the first thing they do is the group spends 45 minutes buying a bunch of shit they're never going to use, right? It's the same thing with DevOps, right? It's like, oh yeah, we're going to do DevOps and we're going to get all this stuff and it's going to be awesome. Wait till the adventure starts, then figure out what you need, all right? So now you've got your party, everyone's together, you're ready to kick some ass, what's the first thing you're going to do, right? You're going to find a dragon and kill it, right? No. No, I know it's called Dungeons and Dragons, but guess what, you die because dragons are hard, right? Dragons will basically party wipe everyone because you're level one, you don't know what you're doing yet. So what do you need to do? You need to go somewhere and you need to find some level one and kick its ass all day long, right? You can hang out where the murlocs hang out, beat them up as much as you can. Why? Because it helps to build confidence. You get to have these little mini victories and you get to figure out how the team works, what are the dynamics, what are the team strengths, their weaknesses, and you get to iron out those kinks. You do that first on the small stuff before you go try to tackle the dragon. Level up on different skills too because there's nothing worse than having a level 45 Apache Docker wizard and then a level two DBA because guess what, that's gonna suck, right? Because sooner or later something's gonna go down, you guys are gonna be like, oh man, I don't even know where the binary log is. So once you get done with these sort of like mini, tiny adventures, you're gonna move into campaign mode, right? That's where there's an overarching sort of story and we're gonna take you on a journey and that's sort of where the change agent and the dungeon master kind of come together, right? They're gonna begin the campaign, but first they have to set the campaign. What is the story gonna be like? Where are we headed? The change agent is thinking, all right, what is the ultimate solution that we're trying to deliver for the business and actually come up with something that's beneficial other than just a bunch of new cool technology in the environment. So you gotta architect the campaign and you gotta help guide the strategy. How many have lived in an environment where it's like we've got technology for technology's sake and we're not even sure what problem we're trying to solve? Yeah, that's what I figured. Wow, that happened a lot faster than I thought it would. Cool, so we talk a lot about culture in DevOps, right? You see this D&D group, they're smiling, that's rare. They're usually mad and angry at each other, right? So how do you actually make that happen? Well, there's a few easy tips. The first tip I think is pretty straightforward but hard to follow sometimes, right? Don't play with assholes, right? And it's the same thing in your work environment. You know who they are, right? So don't invite them into the DevOps culture right away because that first team that starts everything off is gonna be the baseline for what people are expecting out of the DevOps community, right? Align people in goals, right? Make sure that everyone's working towards the same thing. If you've got a character that worships the demon and a cleric, it's gonna go bad, right? There's no way they're gonna be able to work together. It's the same thing with DevOps. Make sure we're aligning our resources and our goals. Characters die, hopefully your coworkers don't. But the moral of the story is people will leave and come back, there'll be new characters added and you can't build a campaign around a single character because if they disappear, what do you do? It's the same thing with your DevOps team. You can't have that one guy that does everything and it's sort of the epicenter. And lastly, house rules are okay, right? You're gonna read a lot of blogs, a lot of books are gonna tell you, well, this is DevOps and this is how it works. Your environment may be different. You might have to tweak it. Having a house rule is okay, right? You just have to accept it and move on. And this is my cheat slide, because it's my own house rule and I ran out of stuff to say. If you're interested, if you guys are enjoying the DevOps conference, there's a DevOps book club. So if you're interested, look for DevOps Chicago out there in Meetupland and join us. Thanks.