Alan Shimel + John Willis Welcome

Hey, everyone. I'm Alan Shimel. And the guy standing here next to me is John Willis.

Welcome. Welcome to Techstrong Con 2020. First of all, thank you for coming.

We both, John and I, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Just a quick word, you know, when this whole COVID thing went down, about three, three and a half months ago now where it really kind of hit home, I felt like the tech community — I had a good feeling that of all the different verticals in the world, tech would be strong. Tech would come out of this well because, more than ever, the world's going to need what we do to keep the lights on, to keep the wheels going.

And it was important for us to, to be strong about it and, not to celebrate because there's too much sadness in the world right now to celebrate, but to acknowledge that it's a strong community. And that was the idea behind Techstrong. And it was also about, you know, raising money.

And I couldn't think of a better person to go through than John Willis to help me with this. And I asked John and and he took it and ran with it. So, John, take it away.

Alan it's kind of funny when you first you know, we've been sort of collaborating on a couple of things over the years and created a great friendship. " Right. Like, you know, the collaboration and learning.

Right. So, most of the people that sort of follow you or me or this community, were about learning. And I really think even before sort of the last couple of days or last week, there's so much pain.

And if there was — and I always saw this as let me go invite, you know, 30 or 40 people that I just love to see present. Like, I mean, these are people that like I sit up front, I take massive amounts of notes. And so, the line up is off the chart today.

Right. And one thing I want to say to speakers is, like, how much me, and I know Alan, and we appreciate your time. " But we have a plenary tracks, which is like amazing.

Andrew Clay Shafer, who's actually my boss. But I've always said that, you know, probably one of the top two DevOps presentations ever given was one by Andrew. We got Liz Rice.

She's forgotten more about container and Kubernetes security than I'll probably ever learn. And then we got a real treat. Stick around for William Hurley.

This guy is a serial entrepreneur. All right. I got to meet him very early in my sort of distributed computing stage-part of my sort of history.

And I've just watched him move on to create company after company. And now he's in quantum computing. So, he's a friend of mine and I asked him, would you mind doing something just completely different?

" It's going to be amazing. And then and then we have, again, stick around today. We got the cast of characters that you probably already know if you follow Alan and I, like Baruch from JFrog, Damon Edwards, Derek from Sonatype, James Wickett.

Shannon Leitz. So, you know, we're really stacked, there's a lot of other people. But there's a bunch of people that you may or may not know that I have had the opportunity to meet by being in different conferences around the world.

So if you don't know Cat Swetel. Sorry. She's incredible.

Like, do not miss that session. Cornelia Davis, Jessica Dean is like, insane how good she is as a speaker. Kris Pennella is — she runs a lot of the Red Hat stuff I've gotten online stuff, the open innovation stuff that should be amazing.

And then Pat O'Neil, I actually just this year worked on a paper on automated cloud governance and Pat O'Neil is one of the fellows over at FedEx. I learned so much about cloud governance and risk from him. So, he'll be great.

Rosalind Radcliffe, if you don't know her from the DevOps Enterprise tribe, she's been doing his stuff as long as I have and she spends, you know, many years from mainframe to distributed now a big speaker. Anyway, the point is, stick around today. It really, you know, I'm hoping from people who really enjoy learning that your original idea, Alan, to sort of cheer people up in that respect they've given the times.

Right. And I think it's going to be mission accomplished. I agree.

John, if you don't mind. I got to add a few more people to your list. Sure.

You know, I wish you would. Yeah. So look.

You know, John, John's right. We have 50 strong speakers today. People who aren't — and like John said, these are people that I usually sit in the front and tweet about or we write about on our various sites.

But other people I really want you to pay attention to. This is my friend Emmet Keeffe. Emmet is actually Emmet Keeffe The Third.

Emmet is a principal person at Insight Partners, and they invest in so many of the companies that we all use in the DevOps in cyberspace. But Emmet runs something called Insight IGNITE, which is almost a monthly get together of large enterprises and vendors. And he is the big one, of the biggest networks I've ever seen, in terms of C level people and, you know, startups and entrepreneurs.

And he's going to talk today about what he's seeing post COVID. Where are the areas where we're making bets in this community? What what are companies prioritizing and what should you be prioritizing?

Don't miss Emmet Keeffe. My friend Chenxi Wang, Dr. Chenxi, maybe to some of you.

Chenxi is probably one of the smartest people in security. She started her own woman-run venture capital, Rain Capital fund. But she's just — watch her speak, you'll know, you realize how smart she is.

My buddy Mike Rothman, you know, Mike's a former analyst, but he's been doing the Securosis thing for 12, 14 years, founded DisruptOps. Mike, Mike has DisruptOps. Mike has amazing things to say.

Those are just people who are — all the people John mentioned, by the way. They're all here in this main stage. We have a spotlight stage, too.

So, we actually have two different auditoriums with dueling tracks going all day. Over in that spotlight auditorium. You know, we do have a lot of the sponsors who was speaking, but just the way John handpicked the speakers here.

We also handpicked the speakers there. And we've got some amazing, amazing presentations going on. We've got two guys talking from AWS about sort of the AWS way of doing things now with COVID and everything.

Don't miss that one. We have Brian Dawson, who is the chief evangelist at CloudBees in software delivery management. And Brian has amazing — I actually help record it.

I know — Brian's presentation is amazing. There's got to be 20 or 30 presentations, 20, 25 presentations over there. Twenty or 25 or more over here.

As I said, it's 50 strong. John, here's the other thing, though. Over 75% of the speakers are logged on live during their sessions when their sessions were live and are available for Q&A, right in the interface here.

Live Q&A, it's not video chat. It's just text chat. But you can ask the speakers.

The rest of the community can join in, because as great as the speakers are, this event's about you. This event is about you, the people who are coming here. Our tech community.

About being strong, about continuing our learning and our — I mean, we are kind of, you know, the engine that's pulling this. Right. And as great as the speakers are, it's really you.

And it's about you. Yes. One thing I want to point out is, you know, I've seen obviously done a lot of virtual conferences this year so far, given where we're at.

I've noticed very few of them really interact. And the beauty of this is I'll just tell you, the sessions were all prerecorded, so 75% of speakers will actually be able to talk to you. Normally, when you're giving a presentation like you can't have a conversation with somebody, but you can literally ask questions of the speaker while the presentation is on.

And they can answer your questions during the session. So please take advantage. I've been to a couple of virtual conferences where the dialogs and Q&A, you know, while the session, were just fantastic.

One, other major point. I wanted you to do is a big close, my friend, but a code of conduct. You know, we have a code of conduct.

And, you know, so while you're on the chat, the same rules apply to sort of the, you know, the physical world. You know, be respectful. I will post up a code of conduct on the on the Techstrong conference site and just, please, be courteous of everybody and empathetic to any discussions that you have.

Excellent point, John. Yeah. I mean, because part of the tech community being what we are, we do need to have a higher standard.

Let be the light, especially as John alluded to earlier, it's been a tough week. Right. Let's be the light.

Andrew is going to talk about that right. Andrew Shafer's keynote is all about it. Don't miss it.

One other thing, and John alluded to it, let me mention. Excuse me. When I originally had the idea for Techstrong TV, part of it was to give back.

Give back to the community, but also to give back to the broader community of people who are suffering. S. alone, there's 40 million people out of work.

In the rest of the world, there's this economic chaos ensuing. And in our own small way, my notion was to donate a portion of the proceeds of this event to the community. And look, we're not charging you.

So you may ask what proceeds? Well, the sponsors did pay good money to sponsor this event. And we're taking a chunk of that money and giving it to COVID-19 charities.

We'll make a full listing after the show. We're not charging you, though. It is a free event.

But please, as John said, be mindful, courteous, be the light. How much are we giving? It depends how many people show up today.

We're giving a minimum of 20,000 dollars, but it will go up depending on how many people took the Techstrong Con Challenge, how many people registered, how many people show up. Look, from my point of view, I'll write the check, I'm happy to. Spread the word.

This is 12 hours. We have 100 hours of video, John. I don't know if you're aware of that.

We have 100 hours of video for this show. So, enjoy the show, everyone. And, you know, learn, share, collaborate and keep doing what you're doing because it's so important you don't realize how important it is to the broader world of what we're doing right now, making sure that the internet is up, and the cloud is working, and our apps are working, and we're able to get food delivered to our houses and supplies, and thanks to the frontline workers who make that happen, too.

John, I'm going to give you the last word. Yeah, just one other thing I wanted to point out is if you have a cough, we're running multitracked and some non-plenary tracks. But so if there's a conflict between two to three speakers.

All these will be loaded up in Digital Anarchist. After that. Yeah.

And they're available on demand, right. Right this day, John. If you don't see it right, if there's two going on at 10.

Pick one. And then at 10:30 or 11, watch the other. You may miss what's going on at 11:00.

This whole environment will be up for three months. With all of the tracks loaded. So you could come back.

But, John mentioned Digital Anarchist's. Right. John and I are partners on Digital Anarchist.

0. And it's more it's more to John's vision of we wanted to create Netflix for you. And we — It's not quite Netflix, but we're getting there.

com. Well, good. It's going to be fun today.

I'll be online all day. I'll be floating around in a lot of the Q&As. I have a couple of sessions, and you just reach out to me.

I love the dialog on this stuff. So, you know, I just love, you know, this is the industry that shows me. So, I just love thinking about it, talking about it, having conversations with intelligent people.

So, see me online. All right. Take care everyone.

Enjoy Techstrong Con. Yeah, take care everybody.