DevOps began in an empty room

At the Agile 2008 conference, Patrick Debois and Andrew Clay Shafer tried to run a session on 'Agile Infrastructure'; by John Willis's account, no one came. In 2009 Debois, fired up by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond's Velocity talk '10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr', organized a two-day event in Ghent called DevOpsDays. Fewer than 50 people attended, and the event's name became the movement's name.