On stage at Datadog Live Sydney
A couple of weeks back I got to sit on the customer panel at Datadog Live Sydney, held at the W Sydney on Darling Harbour. An afternoon of customer stories and fresh Datadog announcements, and somehow I ended up on a stage in front of a room full of engineers, which is not how I usually spend a Thursday.
The best part of the panel was the company. Andrew Burton, Head of Platforms at THE ICONIC, and Pramod Nathan, Senior Manager of Platforms & Services at UNSW, were fantastic to share a stage with. Both of them have real depth of insight, and it shows. They are clearly leaders in this space, and I learned a lot just from listening to how they think about reliability. If you ever get the chance to hear either of them talk, take it.
Special thanks to our host, Matt More, Principal Observability Strategist, APJ at Datadog, who made me feel extremely comfortable both before and during the panel. Keeping a panel relaxed sounds simple, but it is a real skill, and it turned the whole thing into a conversation rather than a test.
Honestly though, my favourite bit came after, once the formal part wrapped up. I caught up with people I knew, met plenty I didn’t, and talked shop with people who care about the same things I do. The hallway track is always worth staying for.
The panel even got a write-up over at IT Brief, so apparently some of it stuck.
Big thanks to Datadog for the invite, and to everyone who came up for a chat afterwards. Happy to have been part of it, and if another invite lands, I would say yes again.