DevOps, Horizontal and Vertical Scaling, and Yoga

The Digital Ocean Deploy conference is going on right now. I watched a few sessions yesterday and, for the most part, it was fairly typical. There were your keynotes highlighting success stories and talking up the company, breakouts touting new features, and technical talks. But simultaneously there was an entire "Wellness Track".

This almost didn't even jump out to me. The last few conferences I've attended, including several for Salesforce, have had something similar. In the Wellness track for Digital Ocean you could find talks about ergonomics, soothing DJ music, and yoga instructions.

I think one of the more interesting parts about this is how common it's become–to the point where it didn't really stand out to me. But even five years ago it would have seemed very strange that tech conferences would have this kind of content right along side their main track, and even competing with their keynotes.

Either way, I found myself checking out the wellness track throughout the day, and found that I appreciated it being there. But is this really just big tech jumping on a trend–and maybe even a trend that became necessary in part because of big tech? Probably. Should we be cynical about it? Maybe. But I'll take my soothing hip-hop where I can get it.

If anything, I appreciate that this response to a broader trend points to how big that trend really is. And right now I need general wellness more than I need cloud containers and one-click deploy.