Bernd Erk
Bernd Erk is CEO at NETWAYS and co-founder of Icinga.
He’s been working with open source for most of his career, somewhere between infrastructure, automation, and community.
In the early days of the DevOps movement, he was involved in the first DevOpsDays and helped spread the ideas that shaped today’s open infrastructure culture.
Over the years, he’s given more talks than he can count, always around the same theme: how people, not tools, make technology work.
Sessions
Infrastructure used to be something you learned by breaking things, fixing them, and asking people smarter than you for help.
Today, AI tools promise to skip that part. You can generate configs, debug systems, and write code without ever really understanding what’s going on. It’s fast and efficient, but it also quietly removes the path from junior to senior.
If we replace learning with automation, we won’t just lose jobs; we’ll lose the next generation of people who know how things work. This isn’t only a technical problem. It’s a cultural one.
As a community, we have to decide whether open source remains a space for shared learning and mentorship or just another layer of abstraction we consume.
This talk is a reflection on what we’re giving up in the name of progress and how the open source world might still hold the antidote.