Are you getting excited for Minnebar? We are too! Don’t forget to submit a session, vote for sessions you like, and set your alarm for tickets (first release is this Thursday at 2pm!). If you’re wondering what to expect from the day, check out our Ultimate Guide to Minnebar13.

If you have never been to Minnebar before, one of the things we do to kick off our day is called Sesssion 0. All other sessions throughout the day are a break-out or ‘choose your own adventure’ style. Session 0 is a little different. We start our day together with a dynamic leader in our Minnesota technology community, and this year we are honored to be joined by Bridget Kromhout.

Bridget is a Principal Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft. Her CS degree emphasis was in theory, but she now deals with the concrete (if ‘cloud’ can be considered tangible). After 15 years as an operations engineer, she traded being on call for being on a plane. A frequent speaker and program committee member for tech conferences, she leads the devopsdays organization globally and the devops community at home in Minneapolis. She podcasts with Arrested DevOps, blogs at bridgetkromhout.com, and is active in a Twitterverse near you.

Her session is entitled “Computers are easy; people are hard.” Check out a little more about her session here:

Designing distributed systems means considering failure scenarios—both likely and less so. Will the network let you down? (Almost assuredly.) Will some portion of your IaaS misbehave? (Have you met computers?) We build in graceful degradation for much of our automation but often neglect the (just-as-essential) human interactions.

The classic “hard problems” of cache invalidation and naming things revolve around our understanding of what’s correct and true and our agreements with one another on scope and relevance. Communication is essential for making context-dependent decisions. Whether we’re attempting to determine the current state of reality or distinguish logical boundaries, democratized observability is key to answering our questions.

As the fractal complexity of our distributed systems grows, we need to mindfully choose practices that work with our tooling. You can’t buy a silver bullet, but you can forge one from the collaborative efforts of your team.

We are excited to have Bridget to help kick off our day, and can’t wait for you to join us at Minnebar13 this April 14th at Best Buy’s Corporate Headquarters!