October 30-31, 2009. Ghent, Belgium. patrick-debois organized the first devopsdays-conference, bringing together roughly 60-70 practitioners from the Agile and operations communities. This is where the DevOps movement crystallized and, incidentally, where the term "DevOps" was coined.
The naming. The conference was called "DevOpsDays." When organizing the Twitter hashtag, "DevOpsDays" was too long, so it was shortened to "DevOps." The abbreviation stuck, naming the movement retrospectively — much of what had been happening before now had a name to cohere around.
Who was there. john-willis was the only American attendee. andrew-clay-shafer participated — his agile-infrastructure-bof-2008 connection to Debois was the proximate cause of the conference existing. The format combined formal talks with open-space discussions, a model the conference series has maintained.
What converged. The event synthesized three streams that had been developing independently: the Agile development community's practices and values, the web operations community's experience running large systems in production (represented concretely by ten-deploys-per-day-velocity-2009 just months earlier), and the infrastructure automation community (CFEngine, Puppet, Chef). The conference gave these communities a shared event and a shared term.
The series. DevOpsDays continued as a community-organized conference series. It now runs dozens of events per year globally, in cities from Amsterdam to Zurich to São Paulo. It remained community-organized and practitioner-driven — a deliberate contrast with the commercial conference model. gene-kim later created the devops-enterprise-summit-founding-2014 as a separate venue for large enterprises, recognizing that the DevOpsDays audience and the enterprise audience had different needs.
Significance. Movement founding events are not always as clean as they seem in retrospect — the movement was clearly already happening before Ghent. But Ghent provided the crystallization: a name, a community gathering, and a format that could replicate. Without the accident of the hashtag, "DevOps" might never have stuck as the term. Naming matters.