To help show how helpful DOES was for me, I'll start off with why I decided to attend: Psychological safety hasn't been very high at the place I work for. Since Covid hit, things seemed to get worse. We had over 50% of our business unit's developers dedicated to working full time just to get monthly releases out the door. With a hiring freeze underway, we had to pivot our company to run to revenue to survive. I was assigned to a 3 man release team to take over releases for 6 interwoven products and speed up the process. There's been many 60-80 hour weeks over the last couple of months and many weekends spent pulling all-nighters to get a release loaded. Incidents increased pressure as everyone, from developers to the CEO, wanted to find ways to stop our outages. Frustration was high on my team before the pandemic, but things seemed to get worse as expectations were higher with tighter resources. I started to get exhausted and annoyed at our processes. Trying to find someone with advice, I searched through all of my contacts in my phone and on LinkedIn and came up empty. I read a bunch of books and binge watched past Summits on Youtube. With the lowered cost to attend, I decided to pay for myself to come and get up at 3AM in hopes that maybe I could just find one person that could give me a few pieces of advice. I absolutely loved the whole thing. I enjoyed the talks so much that I just finished watching all of the breakout sessions that I didn't get to watch during the conference. Seeing what others were learning in the Slack channels helped point me towards new ideas I hadn't thought of before. I got opportunities to talk to fellow attendees and pages of notes. I interacted with some of those same speakers and authors I had already been learning from when I decided to attend! There were so many people excited to talk about the things I'm excited about! The broad range of topics showed areas to improve in technical areas from development environments to incidents to releasing with lower risk and higher frequency. It also helped in non-technical areas. Now, it's much easier to put into words the culture of fear I've been experiencing and how to take first steps of change for the better. It helped me better be able to speak leadership's language and find ways to meet their goals without a high human cost. I walked away from the conference energized and excited again. Every day, I've been able to find something from the conference to share and make improvements in. Thank you so much to everyone that helped plan DOES and gave talks! It's been an encouragement to me, and hopefully my story can encourage you too! Looking forward to hopefully being able to come again in the future!

To help show how helpful DOES was for me, I'll start off with why I decided to attend: Psychological safety hasn't been very high at the place I work for. Since Covid hit, things seemed to get worse. We had over 50% of our business unit's developers dedicated to working full time just to get monthly releases out the door. With a hiring freeze underway, we had to pivot our company to run to revenue to survive. I was assigned to a 3 man release team to take over releases for 6 interwoven products and speed up the process. There's been many 60-80 hour weeks over the last couple of months and many weekends spent pulling all-nighters to get a release loaded. Incidents increased pressure as everyone, from developers to the CEO, wanted to find ways to stop our outages. Frustration was high on my team before the pandemic, but things seemed to get worse as expectations were higher with tighter resources. I started to get exhausted and annoyed at our processes. Trying to find someone with advice, I searched through all of my contacts in my phone and on LinkedIn and came up empty. I read a bunch of books and binge watched past Summits on Youtube. With the lowered cost to attend, I decided to pay for myself to come and get up at 3AM in hopes that maybe I could just find one person that could give me a few pieces of advice. I absolutely loved the whole thing. I enjoyed the talks so much that I just finished watching all of the breakout sessions that I didn't get to watch during the conference. Seeing what others were learning in the Slack channels helped point me towards new ideas I hadn't thought of before. I got opportunities to talk to fellow attendees and pages of notes. I interacted with some of those same speakers and authors I had already been learning from when I decided to attend! There were so many people excited to talk about the things I'm excited about! The broad range of topics showed areas to improve in technical areas from development environments to incidents to releasing with lower risk and higher frequency. It also helped in non-technical areas. Now, it's much easier to put into words the culture of fear I've been experiencing and how to take first steps of change for the better. It helped me better be able to speak leadership's language and find ways to meet their goals without a high human cost. I walked away from the conference energized and excited again. Every day, I've been able to find something from the conference to share and make improvements in. Thank you so much to everyone that helped plan DOES and gave talks! It's been an encouragement to me, and hopefully my story can encourage you too! Looking forward to hopefully being able to come again in the future!