DevOpsCon Amsterdam 2026: It’s my docs, and I will cry if I want to!

My last DevOpsCon event was in Munich, so when I saw they were expanding and visiting my home country in Amsterdam, Netherlands I could not resist. I submitted a few things and the one that was selected is a talk I'm going to be testing based on my experiences over the last year as a maintainer on the Fluent Bit CNCF project.

I will be on-site at the Van der Valk Hotel Amsterdam-Amstel for DevOpsCon Amsterdam from 20-24 April 2026. They will have networking, sessions, and hands-on workshops available for all who attend.

Below you'll find my talk details and the schedule.

My talk was added to the Observability & Reliability track and is scheduled for Wednesday, 22 April 2026 at the time of this writing. 

It’s my docs, and I will cry if I want to! 

(Surviving and reviving documentation in a decade-old open source project)

Documentation is often the unsung hero — or the forgotten relic — of open source software. After ten years of development, Fluent Bit, a high-performance logging and metrics processor, has grown into a complex ecosystem of plugins, integrations, and configuration options. Meanwhile, its documentation has struggled to keep pace. In this talk, I’ll share the journey of inheriting and maintaining a decade’s worth of documentation debt in the Fluent Bit Docs project. We’ll explore what happens when docs evolve slower than code, the challenges of balancing accuracy with accessibility, and how technical debt in docs is just as real (and painful) as in code. 

I’ll share my experiences with:

• Auditing and triaging outdated documentation at scale (getting started)
• Building collaboration between developers, contributors, and users (trying to!)
• Modernizing doc structure and tooling without burning it all down (step-by-baby-step)
• Restoring your sanity — and maybe even your love for docs (the ongoing rewards!)

Whether you’re a doc maintainer, an open source contributor, or just someone who’s cried over a barebones README, this talk will commiserate and (hopefully) motivate you to never fear a docs challenge again!

Looking forward to seeing you there and getting feedback on what you think of this topic!