DevOps Society - The Human API Workshop

The Human API: An Evening of Debugging How Your Team Talks

Thursday 12 November | 6pm–9pm | AND Digital, Birmingham

You can build infrastructure, automate deployments and troubleshoot Kubernetes at 2am.
But how good are you at explaining an idea, handling an awkward conversation, speaking in front of a room or simply connecting with someone you’ve never met before?

On 12 November, Steve Wade is taking over DevOps Society Birmingham for the evening.

No panel. No conveyor belt of speakers. One keynote, one interactive talk and one hands-on workshop designed to get engineers away from their laptops and actually talking.

Want to get better at communicating, presenting and thinking on your feet? Register and join us.

Meet Steve Wade

Steve is the Founder of Platform Fix, a Kubernetes Ambassador for DevOps Society and someone who has spent the last 15 years working in production infrastructure.
He started working with Kubernetes back at v1.2. He's a former Flux maintainer and Istio contributor. He has trained more than 6,000 engineers on cloud-native tooling worldwide and has spoken at conferences including KubeCon and DevOps Pro Europe.
This will be Steve's 68th talk, but this one is going to be a little different.
Rather than spending three hours sitting down listening to slides, you'll be getting involved.

Why are we doing this?

Technical teams spend huge amounts of time improving tooling, infrastructure and processes. Communication often gets nowhere near the same attention. Yet it's involved in almost everything engineers do.
Explaining an architectural decision. Giving feedback. Running a stand-up. Challenging an idea. Presenting to leadership. Asking for a promotion. Speaking to someone you've never met at a meetup.
Being technically strong matters. Being able to communicate what you know can make that technical ability considerably more useful.
And no, you don't need to be a natural public speaker.

In fact, if the thought of getting on stage makes you uncomfortable, this evening was pretty much designed for you.

Ready to give it a go?

Register for the event and come along on 12 November.

What happens on the night

Act 1: AI, DevOps and Kubernetes: What's Next?
Steve kicks things off with a short 15-minute keynote looking at what's actually changing across Kubernetes, AI and platform engineering.
No hour-long predictions about how AI is going to replace everybody.
Just Steve's view after more than a decade working in the cloud-native ecosystem.

Act 2: The Human API
Then we get into the main talk.
Why can engineers communicate perfectly with computers in multiple languages but struggle to explain something to the person sitting next to them?
This won't just be Steve talking at you.
You'll meet people around you, try different ways of starting conversations and learn practical techniques you can use in meetings, stand-ups, interviews, presentations and everyday work.
You'll also learn a much better question than the usual:
"So... what do you do?"

Act 3: Owning the Stage

This is where things get interesting.
The final hour is a hands-on workshop on confidence and presenting.
In small groups, you'll answer unexpected questions out loud. You'll use a simple structure you can reuse at work.
We finish with PowerPoint Karaoke. A few volunteers present a deck they've never seen while the slides keep moving. Everyone else enjoys the chaos.
There are no grades, no judges and no expectation that you'll suddenly become a TED speaker.
It's simply an opportunity to practise something most engineers rarely get the chance to practise.

You'll leave with

You'll get practical communication techniques you can use at work, practice presenting in front of a small group, a better understanding of what's happening across AI and cloud-native engineering, and Steve's Communication Playbook to take away afterwards.
More importantly, you'll spend the evening with other people working across DevOps, cloud, SRE and platform engineering in Birmingham.

So even if PowerPoint Karaoke isn't your lifelong ambition, there will be plenty of people worth meeting.

Who should come?

This event is aimed at DevOps engineers, SREs, platform engineers, cloud engineers, developers, engineering leaders and anyone working in technology who wants to become better at communicating what they know.

Especially if you've ever:
Sent a Slack message that landed completely differently from how you intended.

Had a great technical idea but struggled to get people behind it.
Avoided presenting because you hate speaking in front of people.
Watched somebody less technical communicate their way into opportunities you wanted.

Or found writing Terraform considerably easier than asking for a pay rise.
You'll fit right in.

Event details
Thursday 12 November 2026
6pm–9pm
AND Digital
The Foundry
6 Brindley Place
Birmingham
B1 2JB

Come on your own, come with your team or send it to someone who'd enjoy it.

A quick note about emails

When you register, Steve will also email attendees before and after the event. You'll get the session materials, his Communication Playbook and a short follow-up series.
One email in that series mentions his consultancy, Platform Fix.
One click unsubscribes you from Steve's emails. Nothing from DevOps Society changes.

Huge thanks to AND Digital for hosting us, and providing the food & drinks!

Register now
This isn't an event where you're expected to sit quietly at the back for three hours. You'll meet people, get involved, learn something useful and probably end up doing something slightly outside your comfort zone.

Hit Register and join us in Birmingham.

Already coming? Share the event with someone from your team and bring them along too.