Key Takeaways from DevOpsDays Amsterdam 2025: Community, AI, and Platform Engineering

After attending DevOpsDays Amsterdam for what must be the seventh or eighth time, I can confidently say it remains one of my favorite conferences in the industry.

The event's unique combination of workshops, single-track talks, and Open Spaces consistently delivers valuable insights that I apply throughout the year. The balance between technical skills and interpersonal capabilities (often the more challenging of the two) makes this conference particularly valuable.

This year's edition lived up to expectations, offering fresh perspectives on community building, AI integration challenges, and the evolving landscape of platform engineering.

Workshops

The opening workshop on "Liberating Structures" provided an excellent foundation for the conference. These simple yet effective collaboration methods offer alternatives to traditional meeting formats, fostering more inclusive and engaging participation. The interactive nature of this session not only helped me connect with fellow attendees (many of whom I encountered throughout the conference) but also inspired me to implement these techniques at our upcoming company retreat.

Niek Van Raaij from Schuberg Philis delivered a practical workshop on "Are You Mission Critical Ready?", an assessment framework that works well as both an individual reflection tool and team discussion starter. Having been familiar with Schuberg Philis since attending Chef meetups at their offices over a decade ago, it was encouraging to see our continued alignment on company culture and technical excellence.

Talks

What stood out to me was the number of platform engineering talks, which I found interesting after nobody raised their hand when asked “who here does platform engineering” at Devopsdays Ghent, in Antwerp. I found those to be less enticing. And that’s okay, the meat of this conference are the Open Spaces. Nonetheless, I came home inspired by at least a couple of speakers.

Thiago de Faria talked about the sociotechnical debt of AI. On the hidden costs and constraints that emerge when organizations bolt AI capabilities onto existing team structures without considering the broader sociotechnical implications. The takeaways were a couple of recommendations:

• AI literacy training
• Verifying what comes out of AI (treat this as first class citizen)
• Map your information flows
• Set aside AI-free space/time for critical thinking

Nancy Beers gave us a rundown on Dutch Hacker Camp culture and made me bookmark Fri3d Camp (a Belgian kids-friendly alternative). Made me feel a part of, and appreciative of the community at large.

Day two talk that stood out to me the most was “A cognitive theory of community” by Don Goodman.

We can build a stronger healthier community by leveraging a little basic neuroscience. Oxytocin is the neurotransmitter of goodwill, love, and trust. It’s also the cause of a lot of toxic behaviors often encountered in unhealthy communities. Understanding the mechanisms of oxytocin in the brain can be a massive help in building welcoming, high functioning communities and help us proactively avoid toxic outcomes.

He was an exceptionally engaging speaker and I could listen to him talk all day, if I’m being honest.

The talk was about oxytocin, and its positive and negative effects on communities. The positives were straightforward: treat people with kindness and respect and you’ll trigger this hormone. The dark sides were something to be more wary of.

The talk was about communities, but you could apply it to teams or departments just as much.

Plenty of takeaways, but the ones I jotted down, are:

• What are you giving that recognises you're thinking about them and not just about you?
• Triggering people with kindness and respect triggers oxytocin.
• Treating people with disrespect will kill your community.
• Oxytocin makes entire communities sensitive to the negative treatment of individual members.
• Successful community programs engage in patterns of repeated activities that demonstrate kindness and respect for its members.
• Failing community programs engage in activities that demonstrate a lack of respect for its members.

Kindness and respect are table stakes. You can and should go much further. This talk triggered me into presenting an Open Space topic, more on that later.

Open Space

Most devopsdays events are a combination of curated talks and self organized conversations. The self organized content is known as “open spaces”. Open Spaces give attendees the opportunity to talk about anything they’d like. A person might suggest a topic they want to learn about, or one they feel like they can help others with. The topics range widely, from highly technical, to pure culture, to board games for networking.

With peers, I discussed:

• is there such a thing as too much autonomy?
• Tips, Tricks, Experience on DevOps Team Dynamics
• Moving to a leadership role
• Community Beyond Kindness & Respect (my topic)
• On Call
• Any Success with Backlogs?

I signed a FrieNDA, but suffice to say it was a joy to partake. Takeaways here were “autonomy should be synonymous with responsibility”, and this goes both ways (in getting it and having it).

DevOps Team Dynamics is the same old: having a devops team will hurt your devops (it shouldn’t be a role or team or department).

On community beyond kindness and respect, triggered by Don Goodman’s talk, I wanted to learn, considering kindness and respect are table stakes, how we saw “going beyond kindness and respect”. It was a pleasure to have the speaker join in as well and hear what he meant. In general, this is about moderating a community (both the good and the bad). About in-groups and out-groups. And how this can even mean (as a manager) becoming the out-group, as to have the in-group aligned.

One quote on on-call I’ll take with me (from Busra Koken), is “Don't feed the human blood to the machines”, which is meant to say: don’t page for the sake of paging. Not actionable? No critical money paths getting cogged? Don’t page.

One other interesting discussion that spawned, that I didn’t partake, was “where are all the people below 35?”. Was an interesting take, considering we suggested an Open Space “where are all the 45+ year olds” last year. Is "devops is dead" for real this time around because people outgrow/retirem, and new joiners is minimal?

Key Takeaways and Next Steps

DevOpsDays Amsterdam 2025 reinforced several principles I'll be implementing:

• Liberating Structures techniques for our next company retreat to improve collaboration
• Mission-critical readiness assessments as a team development tool
• Community management strategies that go beyond basic kindness and respect

The conference once again demonstrated the power of combining structured learning with organic, peer-driven discussions. The organization was flawless, the catering exceptional, and the networking opportunities invaluable.

Thanks to the DevOpsDays Amsterdam organizers for another outstanding event, and to Silverfin for supporting my attendance. The investment in community learning continues to pay dividends long after the conference ends.