The DevOps Community Unites to Fight COVID-19

We are fortunate in the software industry that while COVID-19 can force us to shelter-in-place, it cannot stop software from being deployed. On June 24th and July 1st, thousands of developers and DevOps experts came together in the first-ever virtual swampUP event to learn about software delivery and help in the fight against COVID-19.

As promised, all swampUP 2020 registration fees will be donated to a charity to fight COVID-19.

Announcing the swampUP Speaker Award Winner

This year, JFrog announced a new speaker award, in memory of Carl Quinn, a luminary swampUP speaker, and true friend to JFrog and the entire DevOps community. The winner of the award was selected based on feedback from the participants in the session. Each session was rated by swampUP attendees on the following criteria: speaker, presentation content, and usefulness of the session.

JFrog is proud to announce Jessica Deen, Microsoft Azure Avenger, as the winner of the inaugural swampUP Carl Quinn Speaker Award. Jessica’s talk, Kubernetes Meets Real World: The DevOps Edition, was full of demos, practical advice, and covered a wide range of real-world situations.

“JFrog’s swampUP is my favorite conference to attend, speak at, and participate in, and it has been since my first time speaking there in Napa in 2017. Every year since I look forward to the next iteration of swampUP, and each year I eagerly block my calendar as soon as the new dates are announced. Thanks to how well swampUP is organized, I have been fortunate enough to not only foster great professional relationships, but also life long friendships. It is my honor and privilege to not only be selected to speak each year but to also receive the first-ever Carl Quinn award this year,” said Jessica.

“A huge thank you to all the amazing attendees who have become my friends year after year, and everyone at JFrog: Shlomi, Baruch, Pearl, Casey, Kat, the list is endless – I am so proud to be a part of the JFrog super frog community.”

One of the most influential swampUP speakers and our first ever SuperFrog was Carl Quinn, who passed away earlier this year from complications due to COVID-19. To honor his friendship and mentorship of JFrog we created the Carl Quinn Speaker Award to recognize the attendee rated the best speaker.

“Software engineering was Carl’s passion. And most of all, he truly cared about the people working in it. That’s why very early in his career, he spent his energy creating software to make developers more efficient and then communicating and helping all of us around the world be better developers,” said Fred Simon, JFrog Chief Data Scientist, and Co-Founder.

swampUP presenter, SuperFrog, and developer advocate for Confluent Inc., Viktor Gamov, said “Carl Quinn was an inspiration for me in my career. I learned so many practical things about open source projects and Java just by listening to The Java Posse podcast while I was a postgrad student in Moscow, Russia. I dreamed of meeting with him one day, but I couldn’t even imagine that someday I would share the same stage with him, but I did at swampUp 2018!

I have no doubt that his attitude of sharing and spreading knowledge helped many engineers to become better! We will miss you, and your wisdom will live in us for years to come.”

swampUP COVID-19 Charitable Contribution

One way that JFrog as a company demonstrated our liquid software vision was by transitioning our annual user conference from in-person to swampUP Online Americas, and swampUP Online EMEA/APAC. Focusing on DevOps Fast Forward, with a mission to bring the developer community together to learn from some of the best DevOps practitioners in the industry. We also wanted to use this opportunity to give back to COVID-19 research.

“Life is built on finding significance and belonging. We create communities to support each other; sometimes it’s coding, sometimes we stand up as one to fight a virus” said Shlomi Ben Haim, JFrog’s Co-Founder and CEO. “swampUP is beyond a user conference, it’s become a DevOps community hub, an event that feels like a family reunion. This year we are honored to donate all registration fees to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for WHO, and give back on behalf of all attendees. That’s the power of community. For some, the DevOps community is part of their career. For others, it’s a group of friends that forge a bond beyond technology. For us, our users and community members are our people, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to stand together during these days.”

All registration proceeds from swampUP Online will be donated to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for WHO. Every swampUP Online attendee was able to band together to create a sizable donation of more than $60,000.

This is in addition to JFrog’s support of COVID-19 research with the FrogCare program that provides free world-class DevOps tools to software projects fighting COVID-19.

As the tech community continues to advance and refine DevOps practices and we leap forward with our liquid software mission, we are humbled to be a small part in the larger tech community. We are proud to support our SuperFrogs, following in the model of Carl Quinn, as they share their knowledge and experiences. JFrog is thankful to all that attended swampUP Online Americas and EMEA/APAC, helping to contribute more than $60,000 to help fight Covid-19. We may not be physically together, but we are all connected through our tech community.