Creating DevOps Communities and Events with Andy Burgin, Dustin Collins, and Nathen Harvey

Why Start a Community or Event

The topic came from Andy Burgin, who runs the LeedsDevOps meetup in the UK and works as a senior DevOps engineer at Sky Bet, and Dustin Collins, who runs the Boston DevOps meetup and is a developer advocate at Conjur. Nathen Harvey of Chef joins them. Nathen says an internal event or community makes sense for the same reasons colleagues don't join external ones: fear of sharing trade secrets, and the practical problem that meetups are after work, when "what you really want to do when you're done with work is go to family or go to pub." A lunch and learn during office hours avoids that.

For external meetups, Dustin says one-way conversations don't help much with hard things like DevOps, since participation is what surfaces issues you hadn't thought of. Andy adds that many people can't get to big conferences, so something local gives them somewhere to engage. Nathen says organizers and participants both have to make sure newcomers feel welcome, because "you're only a newcomer the first time you go." Andy started LeedsDevOps about two years ago because the city's meetups were language-specific and none spoke to his ops work, apart from talks on tools like Vagrant. He'd also used open source for years without giving back. Dustin took Boston over from an organizer who quit, partly for selfish reasons: to improve at public speaking and organizing, and for the people he'd meet.

Nathen's advice is "to not start a meetup group," since it's hard work, and if you're the right person you'll do it anyway. Otherwise, give a DevOps-flavored talk at the PHP group and see whether a few people light up. Dustin found some meetups hated it, but a few resonating people is enough. If the room says "Dustin, you're not allowed to come back," Nathen says, that's permission to start your own. Matty describes suggesting that a suburban organizer run events under the Chicago DevOps group instead of splintering, since it's a lot of work.

Doing It Alone, and Finding Help

Dustin ran Boston alone for eight months, spending six to eight hours a week, until a regular attendee who's very logistically minded offered to handle venues and sponsors. Andy has run Leeds alone for two years by being "essentially lazy": early on he took the first two speakers and the most convenient venue, and now the group's reputation lets him pick sponsors, with a backlog of speakers. His early marketing was a web page and a Twitter account, following everyone who followed other user groups in the city, and "being quite British and polite, people would follow me back," which gave him 100 relevant followers in five days. He sees his role as facilitator: "creating the thing and letting the thing happen."

Nathen remembers the first meetups as throwing a party and forgetting the invitations, and says his first DevOps meetup had no topic at all, only a discussion of what the group should be. He ended meetups with checkouts so that everyone shared something and understood "this is not my meetup, this is our meetup." Matty says of the DevOpsDays Chicago kickoff, about 24 people came to the first organizer meeting and about 10 were in the organizer photo seven months later. Trevor says to manage your expectations of volunteers.

Dustin warns that if you start a DevOps meetup with your ops friends, it's easy to end up with an ops meetup: he found himself with about 24 ops people, "and I mean guys," and a 20-minute sidebar on ZFS versus Btrfs. Recruit a developer as co-organizer, he says, and bring in security and business people. Andy says finding speakers beyond Docker talks is hard, and that Windows speakers took extra effort. Dustin adds it's hard to know what people will like: a Python meetup he attended featured a talk about a machine that pricks your finger to test for the flu, with no Python on screen, and the audience loved it.

Local Celebrities, and Mixing It Up

Matty admits to the echo chamber of inviting the usual suspects. Nathen says if you bring in an outsider, also have a local speaker, since "we should also be building local celebrities." Dustin says to vary formats: long talks, short talks, open spaces and panels, or "it's that time of the month again." Matty says to shake things up while it's going well, since his Chicago events fill within 48 hours and always with the same people. Dustin has speakers start basic and go deep, so both newcomers and experts stay engaged. Nathen says DevOps topics are wide, which is why open spaces work.

Trevor's Azure meetup drew mostly developers, and adding infrastructure talks shrank it. Matty says you can't control your audience, and jokes about putting the dev talk second. Dustin's controversial tip is to bring in a business person with a thick skin to tell it like it is, which happened once as a heckled stand-up and gave technical people a shared enemy.

Hosting at Your Company

To a Twitter question about hosting a meetup at a corporation, Nathen says if you want your employer to host, remind them that they're probably hiring, and a meetup brings people through the door. At Custom Ink he'd offer an office tour after each meetup, with the aim of getting people excited about working there without pitching them. Trevor adds that it gives your own team speaking practice. Andy says speaking at other groups promotes your own and is how he learned what DevOps really was: he'd thought it was about Nagios and Chef, "and boy, was I wrong."

A New Segment

Matty announces a podcast recommendation of the episode, and starts with The Food Fight Show, which he says he learned from when he was beginning with DevOps. Nathen says he borrowed the idea of checkouts from the Ruby Rogues.

Matt spends the entire episode claiming that Nathen was famous for being on ADO11, when in fact it was ADO14.

Check Outs

Nathen

• If you’re at a big conf, find the locals and do a mini meetup onsite
• DevOpsDays Podcast
• Public post mortems

Andy

• charlesproxy.com
• John Leech - Nagios Song
• TechnologyUG Leeds Event

Dustin

• ContainerDays NYC - Oct 29-30 - Docker Docker Docker
• Downtown NYC Tech is meeting Oct 28 - Boyd Hemphill/Docker in production
• CMXHub - Good articles/videos on community building
• Jenkins Job DSL - Conjur repo w/ jobs for example

Trevor

• Agents of Shield Season 3
• Surface Book, Nexus 6P <3 gadgets

Matt

• Classy Little Podcast
• Doctor Who LEGO set (Bridget told us about it, how did she know about it and we didn’t?)
• CHICAGO CUBS CHECK THEM OUT YO!!! BUZZ SAW!!!