Inside DevOpsDays London 2025

Recently I attended the DevOpsDays conference held at Imperial College, London. It ran over two days and was packed full of interesting ideas, advice and learnings.

Not your average conference

This was my first time attending and, whilst I'm a seasoned conference goer, DevOpsDays actually does things a bit differently - and the format was really refreshing. The mornings followed a single track of scheduled talks, typical of any conference, but the afternoons were handed over to “Open Spaces”. These sessions are not pre-planned and are self-organised by the attendees on the day.

There were three time slots of 45 minutes each, with eight rooms of varying sizes to accommodate a really wide selection of topics. Attendees proposed their own ideas for discussion and were free to join in whichever sessions most interested them. A few house rules encouraged friendly debate and discussion, as the sessions are facilitated by the group itself.

I’d heard about this kind of unconference idea before, but never taken part. Given the variety of sessions, experiences can vary hugely from person to person. I was impressed with the ones I joined - people were engaged and willing to share their ideas, experience and advice.

Something for everyone

The open spaces covered a diverse range of topics. I won’t list all 48 that took place, but to give you a flavour, here are a few:

• Incident write-ups that people actually want to read
  
• Securing AI coding assistants
  
• Existential dread of a never-ending backlog
  
• Human API
  
• Career progression
  
• 6 Thinking Hats
  
• MVP on-call
  
• Curriculum for Code First Girls
  
• Parenting and work
  
• Pragmatic continual assurance
  
• Supply chain security

They even ran a session to retro the conference itself.

I particularly enjoyed sessions on remote team collaboration, the existential dread of a never-ending backlog, and one on parenting and work. These stood out because they gave space to hear how other people in the industry approach these issues.

For remote team collaboration, people talked about "camera off" cultures and how to encourage more openness without forcing compliance. Most agreed that creating psychological safety is key, with team leads setting the example. Ideas like pairing sessions or shadowing came up as ways to help colleagues relax and connect outside of big group calls.

The “never-ending backlog” is clearly a universal pain point. One useful idea was to assign dates to “later” tickets to stop them being forgotten completely. I shared our approach of using a dedicated support engineer rota to give people space to tackle tech debt and triage incoming requests.

The parenting and work session was very therapeutic. No one had a magical solution to balancing all the challenges that being a parent brings whilst working. However, it seemed that the people there enjoyed having a space to candidly share stories and perspectives. One person mentioned they had intentionally sought out to work for a company run by mothers, which I thought was interesting. Also, the appetite for a four-day week was obvious, and one person who’d experienced it first-hand confirmed it was as good as hoped.

Diversity of ideas, people and perspectives

Aside from the alternative format, another refreshing aspect was the diversity of the conference. DevOpsDays clearly takes pride in this, and it showed. They really made sure the vibe was friendly, welcoming and inclusive to everyone.

All the talks had live closed captioning and a signer. The speakers ranged from CTOs and seasoned pros to juniors, across different backgrounds. They also had a room for child-care and quiet spaces to retreat to.

This allowed for a wide range of perspectives which is really important and I felt that it contributed hugely to the success of the event and particularly to the open spaces format. It also created a safe environment where people felt comfortable discussing neurodiversity and mental health, which really added depth to the event.

Ignite talks

Another new format for me was the Ignite talks. These are similar to the idea of short lightening talks. Each speaker is allowed 20 slides, displayed for 15 seconds each, before automatically moving on to the next one. The sense of jeopardy provides a bit of fun and keeps things interesting (also means the shared information has to be concise).

My favourite ignite talk was on “confusing correlations” - funny, but also a good reminder to dig deeper into data before jumping to conclusions.

Takeaway – beware prompt injection

The conference offered plenty of food for thought, and a nice boost of enthusiasm , which is why I like to attend conferences. Not every session was about AI (thankfully), but actually to pick out one tangible piece of advice I will try to heed is around Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers with AI coding agents.

The key point: You need to be aware that once you enable your agent to use these tools you do open additional attack vectors. The live demo of prompt injection showed how easy it is to manipulate an AI agent to simply disregard the its original instructions and instead carry out some malicious behaviour. LLMs aren't yet good at distinguishing user-authored prompts from those of bad actors.

Hopefully in future these LLMs will improve, but as with all things AI related, it’s a fast moving space and definitely one to be mindful of.

Summary

My day job is actually primarily as a product software engineer working on Katapult. Our team is small, so while I do get involved in some devops-type tasks, the bulk of my time is spent using Ruby and JavaScript to build user-facing features. On face value choosing to attend a devops conference might seem like a slightly unusual choice. However, DevOpsDays has cemented the idea for me that ultimately if the conference is for people trying to build and ship software, then it is actually really valuable to hear from different perspectives, even more so if they don’t hold exactly the same role as you.

All in-all, it was a great conference and I'd definitely go back again. All the talks were recorded and will be published on the DevOpsDays YouTube channel.