orchestructure / Presentations

Presenting at Orchestructure

Orchestructure meets monthly on the last Wednesday of each month at 6pm. We are always looking for awesome people who would love to present on anything relevant to modern DevOps and Infrastructure topics.

This repository is meant to be the authoritative source for information on speaking at Orchestructure, past presentations, and planning around future talks.

Interested in speaking at a future Orchestructure meetup!? File an issue!

Location: Orchestructure is based of out of Ann Arbor, MI and meets at different locations around the city.

Food: Food and drink is provided at every meeting! Don't worry, we're hungry too.

Suggestions are always welcome and encouraged!

Planned Presentations for 2020

All meetups take place from 6-7:30pm on the last wednesday of the month!

• January 29th - Marky Jackson
• February 26th - (TBD)
• March 26th - Thursday meeting!, Zach Steindler
• April 29th - Tentative Workshop
• May 27th - TBD - Duo Security, 1st St, Lower Peninsula Room
• June 24th - TBD - Duo Security, 1st St, Lower Peninsula Room

All following events will be Virtual until Further Notice.

• July 29th - Matt Farina - Helm 3
• August 26th - TBD
• September 30th - Nicholas Klick - GitOps with GitLab
• October 28th
• November and December - No Meetups! Enjoy your Holidays!!!!

Talk Semantics

Orchestructure is meant to be a place where people in (or adjacent to) computer infrastructure fields can assemble to teach, learn, and inspire others. We don't subscribe to any particular way of achieving a goal nor do we tout a singular technology as being the end-all solution.

With this in mind, we're exceptionally open to hearing about any and all methods or technology used by individuals and companies alike. Additionally, we subscribe to an interactive and thought provoking format where everyone can spawn discussion with everyone else.

Finally, presenters should not be afraid to delve into dense functional details and comprehensive descriptions of the topic. Attendees generally enjoy intricately discussed technologies and the varied strategies around solving problems.

A few guidelines all presentations should follow:

• Talks should be around 20-30 minutes (no longer than ~30)
• Demos, examples, interactivity, etc. are encouraged!
• Always start with an introduction of yourself and quick ELI5 of the topic.
• Presentations should have at least some cohesive flow (slides not required)
• One of the organizers should review your presentation resources (i.e. slides) at least 1 week prior to the meet-up
• Be ready to talk no later than 10 minutes after meet-up start (~6:10pm)

Topic Examples

A few examples of great topic ideas!

• Scaling (and associated challenges)
• Clustering/Distributed Workloads
• CI/CD Pipelines and Tools
• Security (or lack thereof)
• Automation/Bots
• Configuration Management
• VM's, containers, packaging and distribution
• Share your Stack! (seriously ;)
• Cloud Specific (AWS, Azure, Google, etc..)
• Interesting use-cases or stories
• The dev side of DevOps
• Team dynamics and working effectively

Of course more bare-bones items like networking, storage, load balancing, etc. are more than welcome!

Tips for a fantastic presentation

A few ideas to help mold your talk:

• Ensure to talk about where you're from, how you got here, and why you love what you do!
• Why you took a particular path to achieve a goal
• Cover lessons learned and retrospective
• Include details about how your team approached the problem/solution
• Focusing on the advanced applicability and execution is encouraged

Lightning Talks

Lightning talks are short (<5min) talks or exercises where anyone can come forward about an exciting thing they've done, are working on, or found. This can be in any form: demo, slides, merely spawning discussion, etc..

Up to two lightning talks can be given after the main presentation finishes. Interested!? File an issue!

Recording

We try to broadcast and publish every presentation through YouTube live through Google Hangouts. They're available on our channel here.

If you would rather your presentation not be recorded, please let us know. Additionally, it is encouraged to not include sensitive information on your presentation materials. Orchestructure can't be held responsible for misuse stemming from your talk, materials, etc..

Remote Presentations

If you live elsewhere or simply can't make it to a future Orchestructure meetup, let us know. We allow a few remote presentations every year and will work with you to get everything setup!

Interested in Sponsoring?

We're always on the lookout for exciting organizations to help keep Orchestructure as strong as possible. Consider donating or becoming a sponsor to help perpetuate your brand and get more in touch with our community!