DEV Community: Benjamin Bryant

Building Communities - Women in Cloud Native

Benjamin Bryant — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 09:00:38 +0000

Recently, I had the opportunity to have an interview with Nancy Chauhan (Twitter, LinkedIn). A Developer Relations Engineer at Gitpod and the co-founder of Women in Cloud Native (Twitter, Discord, Hashnode) a brand new global community dedicated to the idea of - Learning and Growing in Cloud Native Space Together.

Nancy Chauhan

Today we will be focusing on one aspect of community creation. The Launch 🚀…and the bits before it.

What drives someone to try their hand at community creation? How do you overcome the difficulties and obstacles? How do you ensure your community is a welcoming space and be beneficial to its members? When is the correct time to make the social media announcement? What happens next?

There’s no time to waste so let’s do as most stories do and start at the beginning. Let’s start with…

The Drive Behind The Idea

One of the interesting hurdles you can encounter when faced with the prospect of wanting to create a new community, is the question of, “Does it need to be built?” Through Nancy’s experiences and her interactions with others in the field, her answer was yes.

In 2021, The CNCF (Cloud native Computing Foundation) did a Community Survey on Diversity, Equity and Inclusionand although “over 7 of 10 respondents (75%) said open source is becoming more inclusive” interestingly, of those respondents 72% identified as male.

The full survey does a deeper dive into the differences of opinion between demographics and I recommend giving it a look.

For Nancy, although there were communities which included parts of what she was looking for she didn’t feel there was a way to connect effectively with other women within the Cloud Native space. A space to talk about technology, experiences and strategies with others who may have had similar experiences. A space to reach those who may have been an inspiration to you and to reach those you may wish to inspire.

This leaves the quandary: you have an idea; it seems to have a solid enough bedrock and you have the drive to make it happen, what happens next?

It Takes A Community To Build A Community.

It’s often said by people somewhere, that the launch of something is one of the more critical parts to its success. There’s always the worry a community could end up dead on arrival. So, how do you go about giving your community the best chance of survival?

Collaboration

Nancy did not build ‘Women in Cloud Native’ in a vacuum. It was an idea that started as a conversation between her and her friend, now co-founder, Vrukshali (Website, Twitter).

The initial discussions covered topics such as what need could their community fulfil? What is the driving force behind its creation? What lessons could they learn from other communities? Both the successful ones and the ones that failed.

They also had these discussions with people through their networks, networks that were created throughout their time in education and industry to gauge the interest in their idea as well as sought advice from those who had experience with starting communities. Nancy pointed out the importance of her network and how useful, supportive and encouraging they were during these discussions.

Preparation

There was a checklist that was created that needed to be completed before even thinking about announcing the community.

In the above image, there’s the Website, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hashnode, YouTube and the Discord (where I took this image) all ready and created before the first announcement. All those discord channels (on the left sidebar and not all are visible within the image) have custom names and are not the default ones.

What’s our message? Will it be consistent across all platforms? The ‘when’ of when someone encounters your community, could be anywhere, anytime. You want what you are and what you stand for to be clear, confident and easy to understand.

Will those who enter the community know how best to benefit from it? Is it clear, for those who would want to, how they could take part or contribute? In what ways could someone help, if they wanted to? These were all thoughts and ideas they needed to consider.

A question that was important to Nancy throughout this preparation process was “Why are we making this community?” Which I think resonates within the ‘Women in Cloud Native’ logo and branding.

The first thing that popped into my head upon seeing the logo were these song lyrics by Cyndi Lauper in 1983 - 🎵“Girls just wanna to have fun” 🎶 - one of the early feminist anthems which, quoted from the article means, “It ….just means that girls want to have the same damn experience that any man could have.” - Cyndi Lauper

It’s clear there’s a lot of heart behind ‘Women In Cloud Native’ and that shines through to me on each face featured in this logo and throughout my interview with Nancy.

Now it was time for the nerve-wracking part. Release Day. Lights. Camera…

Action

Link

…and scene. You never quite know how something’s going to go until it happens and on the grand scale of starts this is a pretty great one.

Nancy didn’t want to understate how grateful she is towards the support the wider community showed towards this initiative by sharing the community and leaving comments of encouragement both on and offline.

This may have been the first step, but it looks to me like quite a motivating one and there sure was one heck of a run up to it, but now…

The Fun Begins

You’ve successfully lit the initial spark, but how do you keep the fire alive? It was this question that fuelled the rest of my discussion with Nancy. What’s in the future for ‘Women In Cloud Native’?

Now, I don’t want to spoil too much, but there are several events set to be revealed in the coming weeks and the possibility of some swag for certain this, that or the other, but I’ve said too much and I’ve been bound to secrecy, probably.

Though on a more legitimate note, the start of something is always a bit of a scary time. You’re not sure how everything will turn out in the end and you wonder about all the things you could do, all the things you haven’t done, all the ways you may make it worse and so and so forth, it's a potentially dangerous spiral to enter.

A spiral that Nancy is taking steps to navigate through. How? Talking about it. Reaching out to people, reaching out to her community and taking stock of things as they develop. Engaging in the conversations that are taking place, listening to feedback from her members and encouraging those who are eager to contribute and take part.

Communication is on the keychain, and a roadmap is being put together. Events and activities are important to creating bonds and connections, which is one aspiration of the community.

Of course it’s early days. You can’t predict everything that’ll happen on the ship, but you can control how you react to waves. Or something along those lines, I forget the phrase.

The Future Is In Clouds

It’s been less than a month since the launch of ‘Women In Cloud Native’ and there’s nowhere to go but up. It’ll be interesting to see how it grows overtime and if you’re interested in finding out more here are some resources and links featured throughout the article.

Resources and Links

Women In Cloud Native - (Website, Blog, Discord, LinkedIn, Twitter)

Nancy Chauhan , Co-Founder - (Website, LinkedIn, Twitter)

Vrukshali Torawane , Co-Founder - (Website, LinkedIn, Twitter)

Signing Off

It’s been a pleasure meeting and chatting with Nancy Chauhan and I wish ‘Women in Cloud Native’ all the best in the future. As I also do to you, the reader. Have a cool day!

In Go, How Do You Train Your Fun-damentals?

Benjamin Bryant — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 08:41:56 +0000

Over the holiday break, I tried out learning how to draw and stumbled across this course: DrawABox - A free, exercise-based approach to learning the fundamentals of drawing.

What does this have to do with Go? Well, it’s the second paragraph so hear me out. I’ve been thinking lately about how to teach and how to learn. I want to keep my programming skills sharp, but I am struggling with what exactly I should code. What do I practice? How do I keep up?

At first, the goal of this article was literally going to be about finding what the fundamentals of Go are. At a glance, the course’s website initially inspired these thoughts as there was a set of exercises to complete. These looked to grow into 10-15 minute warm-ups you could do before starting a drawing session. Ways to strengthen your fundamentals.

Please note, I hadn’t started the course yet; I was simply looking around the website and coming to my own conclusions.

“Could there be similar challenges for practising Go?” I thought. “Exercises you could do as warmups before getting into things?” However, when I actually started lesson 0 of the course, it introduced me to the 50% rule, and I ended up thinking about something else entirely.

50% Rule

To quote:

The 50% rule is simple. All of the time you spend on drawing is to be divided into two equal portions.

One half will include anything and everything you do with the purpose of improving your skills. Coursework, exercises, studies, tutorials, etc.

The other half is reserved only for drawing done for the sake of drawing. In other words, play. Experimentation, just throwing yourself at the page and giving yourself full freedom to just try, even though the result will likely turn out badly.

Hence the hyphen in the title and the, now revealed, ultimate point of this article. Surprise! Ignoring drawing for a moment, this rule made me stop and ask myself, “When was the last time I programmed for the sake of programming and what does that even mean?”

I advise watching the accompanying video (link below) and reading their written article for more context.

Drawabox Lesson 0, Part 3: Changing your Mindset and the 50% Rule - Video 1

Giving It A Try

This part was the homework: A ‘set of superimposed lines’.

I then spent the same time on the ‘Play’. Behold, ‘A Cosmic Donut’.

Now here’s the weird thing, I found the ‘Play’ to be more difficult than the exercise. I wasn’t sure what should go where and couldn’t help feeling silly. I didn’t quite get it and it felt pointless, but I’d missed one more video that helped to make things clearer.

Overcoming the Fear of An Empty Code Editor

Overcoming the Fear of a Blank Page - Video 2

To summarize, I think because I’d mentally already started writing this article and planned to make a social media post about these pictures, I’d already sabotaged the session.

Subconsciously, the picture now needed to look like what I thought a good first attempt should look like. It now couldn’t include anything that filtered into the top of my mind. It now could no longer take risks, or be a ‘failure’. I was hesitant as what I was making had to be ‘something’ even though, what it really had to be, was just for me.

Pivoting back to Go. This ‘fear of a blank page’ is something I encountered recently.

There’s a line that’s quoted in the top YouTube comment of Video 2 which states

“The need to become a celebrity makes us forget the dreams we had of telling a story”

Now, I don’t exactly have dreams of filling stadiums worldwide because of my ‘Hackerman’ skills, however I still desire to create content that is useful or entertaining to people.

The other day I opened my IDE, created a new project and then wrote nothing because I thought what I’d planned to write would be a waste of time. My thoughts were akin to this:

I felt that if I do something, I probably should write about it.
If I write about it, it probably needs to be of note or useful.
If it’s of note or useful, perhaps it should use newer technologies.
If it’s using newer technologies, I need to use the technologies in the exact way they're supposed to be used, otherwise how can I claim it’s useful?
If I’m using the technologies exactly how they need to be used, I need to read up on a bunch of stuff I don't know about yet.
If it’s stuff I don’t know about how am I supposed to know if it’s stuff I need to know about or if it’s going to turn into stuff I didn’t really need?

A paralytic string of thought that led to nothing being done in the pursuit of saving time for something that was more worthwhile. I didn’t want to write something that would feel pointless. Otherwise wouldn’t I be wasting time?

Can You Overcome The Perceived Pointlessness of Play?

From my vast experience of spending half an hour doing some homework from an online art course, this is my expert interpretation of the videos above and what ‘Play’ is.

It’s about trying. Trying in an environment where it doesn’t matter and giving yourself the time and space to really just try. Even if what you’re trying is ‘beyond your station’. According to you.

‘Play’ is a learned skill. It’s an exercise with no defined parameters.

I don’t think it’s aimless, however, just unstructured. In the videos above the artist draws many things, but they all would’ve begun with a thought such as ‘I want to try drawing a monkey with a banana’. Then they gave themselves the freedom to give it a go, knowing they were going to rip up the pages at the end. (Spoilers).

To bring it back to my experience with the exercises, I believe I found the ‘lines’ were easier to do, because the task ‘had a point’. It was a tutorial, a part of a larger course. It felt that by doing them I was one step closer to moving to the next lesson. One step closer to the goal of completing the course and becoming a better drawer.

The ‘cosmic donut’ was difficult, because I couldn’t see how it connected to the grander picture. It felt pointless not because it was, but because I felt it was. Except here’s a question: Do you remember which stumble finally taught you how to walk, or was it the collective total of them all?

Anyway, those are my current thoughts

I think it’s going to take some time for me to get out of the habit of having to have everything ‘be a thing’. I need to practice learning how to have fun with it. Training my _fun-_damentals.

Now how do I do that? I don’t know. Hence the title. This is more a How do you, rather than a How do you. You know what I mean?

I think the first step might be to look at something I have an interest in but know little about. Then work through a tutorial or what resources are available and try to use those in my own way. No article, no wanting it to be more than it is, no anything, just time spent with me.

Relearning how to experiment, play and fail is a mentality shift and one that won’t happen overnight, but it’s something to work towards and one that I believe is quite important to growth.

I have a habit of forgetting that I am people too and allowing myself the freedom to learn how to have fun with something is, well, useful and entertaining to me. What’s the point of going on a journey with an unspecifiable destination if you’re going to be bored the whole way?

If you can learn to practice, experiment, have patience and fail with something for the sake of yourself, perhaps you may dare to have fun with it.

But yea, as I said in the heading, those are my current thoughts. Nothing could come from them and I believe that’s perfectly ok. Have a cool day and good luck out there!

Go: Around The World - Oslo, Norway - Climate Action and Consultancies

Benjamin Bryant — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 08:30:50 +0000

![Go: Around The World - Oslo, Norway - Climate Action and Consultancies]

Hei! Welcome to the 2nd article in the Go: Around The World series, where I look at the many gophers, places and projects that make up this wondrous world. Today we’re going to be visiting Norway! Oslo, Norway, if you somehow reached here without looking at the title.

Our special guest today is: Marta Paciorkowska (mastodon, website). Starting as a self-taught Ruby developer with a background in climate activism and NGO work, Marta moved to trialing out different languages, such as Go, and worked her way up to becoming a site reliability engineer.

( Marta Paciorkowska )

Although she currently does not use Go in her day-to-day work (that may change soon), it still holds a level of place in her heart as she is now one of the lead organizers for the Go Oslo User Group and helped with its recent post-pandemic reboot.

So, what did we talk about?

Climate Action & Go!

I initially wanted to get in touch with Marta as she was a fellow meetup organizer in a country I’d never visited before. However, as I learnt more about her work towards building climate awareness, I realized I wanted to hear about ways, as a software engineer, I could help. Until this point, it had never crossed my mind that I could.

“I type code on a keyboard to run things, so unless I’m working for a company that’s specifically about addressing climate change directly, I doubt I’ll be able to affect much.” - Me. In da past.

I don’t doubt there are many people who feel demoralized with this topic. It's large, intimidating, easier-to-ignore and no matter how many plastic cups you don’t use it still feels like the world is doomed. Dooooomed!

Wrong! Take heart, because there are millions of people working towards getting the world on the same page and each voice is important and each action matters, including yours.

Marta’s talk ‘Making our Applications Greener’(transcribed version) was an excellent introduction to me on this topic and getting me into the correct headspace. She introduced me to the Green Software Foundation and the power you, as an engineer, may hold in your organization. As an example, where you host your data and the electrical efficiency of your services.

I’d never framed my perspective that way. I know ‘the cloud’ isn’t in the clouds, but each of those data centers that host your code are being powered by electricity and that electricity has to be generated from somewhere.

Look, I know that sounds obvious, but hear me out. Have you, person reading, consciously looked into where your data centers or cloud providers get their energy from? Have you ever thought about picking or moving to one that uses sustainable energy? Or, like me, is this the first time that possibility entered your head? I didn’t even know that was an option. I never even checked! The idea literally didn’t cross my mind until this chat.

& Go…?

Ever heard of Kepler? Marta explained it as, “A Prometheus metrics exporter written in Go that uses eBPF to read kernel statistics and estimate the actual electricity usage of your pods or nodes.”

As someone who knows some of those words, I believe it allows you to monitor the energy consumption of your services. It was built by Sustainable Computing IOand looks pretty cool. Unfortunately, I’ve never dabbled in DevOps or Site Reliability, but it seems quite plug-in-and-playable. Don’t quote me on that though.

_(Picture taken from the Kepler Github Repository) _

Now obviously, I don’t expect you to go away and try to migrate all your services at once to a sustainable data center, or rewrite your services so they consume less energy, but similar to the way Marta and many others started working with Go, you could take small itty-bitty steps!

Marta’s Go journey started with writing a small service in Go instead of Java. Then slowly, over time, and with a bit of advocacy, there was a shift in culture and Go became more widely adopted at the company.

If you’re looking for direction on the smallest possible steps here are a few cool links that Marta shared with me:

The Green Software Foundation

Created the Software Carbon Intensify Specification. A set of guidelines on how to write carbon-efficient software.
Have a free language-agnostic course on the Linux Foundation’s website that introduces these concepts. Takes around half a day to go through it and Marta highly recommends it for all developers to do.

ClimateAction.tech Initiative

Have a Slack, and it is a good networking tool. It gathers many specialists and activists that are on the edge of technology and climate.

Try not to see your actions as an attempt to change the entire world, but your small part of it. If you stare too much at the big picture, you may find you haven’t moved at all. If you can stoke the discussion and get those small wins, they could grow to where your company and community takes things a bit more seriously.

London Gophers Versus Go Oslo User Group. Ready…? Fight!

Funnily enough both of our meetups had similar origin stories. Beginning in 2018, Go Oslo User Group started as a low-threshold hackathon with around 20 people that slowly built to a consistent 40-60 people and grew to have talks and venue sponsors.

I was not there for the beginning of London Gophers in 2013, as I believe I was 13 at the time (ok, ok I was 17, fight me), but the origins were around about the same! However, between our two groups there are some differences.

Norway has a smaller tech scene, but the tech they are working on is on the same level as everywhere else. In terms of population, Oslo is around 600k people, whereas London is around 9 million.

Marta described Go Oslo User Group’s recent post-pandemic reboot as a ‘reunion’. Many of the same faces returned. It seems a smaller scale can help make people more personable and open. You have time to talk to most of your attendees and members are more visible. It’s easier for people to ask questions and think about ideas for talks and share them with the community, as there is less pressure. It’s as if you're simply talking to friends, instead of other ‘professionals’

Could this feeling of ‘togetherness’ be an echo of the larger Norwegian tech scene? It’s smaller, so it seems as if everyone knows each other. Compared to London the entry point in Oslo isn’t graduate schemes or junior positions within a company, it’s consultancies. You’d typically start out at a consultancy and then eventually move to becoming an in-house employee.

Because of this, you end up seeing the same people as you move from one position to the next and interacting with future or past colleagues more frequently. Which, using a cynical eye, may encourage people to not burn too many bridges and focus on collectively working together?

I wonder if I could bring Go Oslo User Group’s sense of tight-knit community to London Gophers or is it something that becomes difficult the larger you get? When I was an attendee pre-pandemic, (back when attendance reached 200+) I remember latching onto a handful of people and didn’t try to expand further than that.

Perhaps what we could do as a larger community is highlight the smaller ones around the UK, or host smaller sessions that could help build up the personal relationships and connections among members of our community?

Right now I’d say if you were new to the Go community and wanted to do a talk, it feels like the vibes of the Oslo meetup might fill you with more confidence to put yourself forward compared to London Gophers. Definitely something I want to think about and improve.

The Importance of Community For Growth

There was one other aspect of Marta’s journey that resonated with my own. The value attributed to Community. When it comes to building your confidence, sharing your ideas and finding out about different opportunities, community is Queen. From the beginning of her journey she’d attended a local Ruby meetup and upon starting work, Marta gave her first tech talk within 3 months. She’s been a constant and active part in several communities.

Marta’s experience with the Chef community (Chef is a configuration management tool, similar to Kubernetes), is one that she describes as incredibly welcoming and was crucial to her building a network that got her to where she is today.

On CVs, most people don’t have things that enable them to stand out easily, such as being a speaker or presenting at conferences, as well as managing an effective and welcoming community.

My journey echoes this. I can directly attribute much of my growth to the communities I’ve been a part of. And as it’s almost Christmas, I’ll include my mother in there too.

Thank you, Marta!

We’ve reached the end of the article and although I did miss a couple things that were mentioned during the interview, such as the Norwegian Police having an IT department that uses Kubernetes(Google Translate may help you here), I thoroughly enjoyed my time talking to Marta and would like to thank her again for coming along for a little chat!

I hope you all enjoyed learning a little bit about Oslo, Norway, and one of the many unique and interesting gophers that live there. As well as some of the ways in which you may be able to help out with climate awareness.

Thanks for reading!

You can follow Marta Paciorkowska on: (mastodon, website) and if you want to know when the next article in this series will be you can follow me on: (mastodon, linkedIn)

Resources

Marta’s Talk: Making our Applications Greener

My DevRelCon Prague 2022 - A Quick Recap

Benjamin Bryant — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 15:00:34 +0000

Yo yo! For the past few days I’ve been attending DevRelCon Prague 2022, it was my first time speaking at an international conference. Welcome to this mini-recap!

Quick caveat, I’ve not left the country in over a decade and the last time I did I was at an age where I needed to be chaperoned, had no decision about where I went, and have no clear memories about it except stealing a blanket from the plane.

Regardless, things written in articles aren’t admissible in court, probably. Now let’s get on with the show!

Parts That Were Awesome!

The bit where the plane bursts through the clouds

I know ‘seasoned’ travellers may say riding an airplane is boring. Which, you know, fair. There’s a lot of waiting when traveling. In the airport, on the plane, in the other airport and all the other bits.

However, I had a window seat and it was a very cloudy day. After the plane had taken off and hit the cloud layer, it was like trying to stare through a thick fog, then boom!

A sea of clouds appeared. I don’t know if I could tire of that part of the experience. There’s a certain romantic element to the idea of flying and it made me wonder about the dreams of those in history who would ask what was beyond the clouds and here I was seeing it.

Though, I suppose the actual dream would be to fly freely without the aid of a machine. To feel the rush of the wind, the cold of the clouds and without the fear of falling to your death. Alas, this is close enough.

Prague’s Cool

Monday was exploration day. I walked around for about 5 hours. But look, I’m not an architecture buff. The building’s look pretty and colourful. They had trams, I’ve not been on a tram, so I went on a tram, now I’ve been on the tram. There was a Starbucks near a castle, and I unfortunately couldn’t find any fudge at the Christmas markets. Oh yea and their subways are a lot roomier than the ones in London and had a countdown, in seconds, to when the train was going to arrive.

The Supportiveness of the Community and The Event

I didn’t know anybody before going there, but that didn’t stop people from trying to get to know me. It felt that I could easily join conversations and with my nervousness about speaking; I got a lot of good and actionable advice.

My nervousness will probably never go away, but I could tell my talk was going to be in excellent hands regardless of how I delivered it.

(Brandon West (Twitter), mid-talk)

It’s clear that a lot of thoughtfulness goes into the management of the event and how the organizers have built the community and I'll likely share some of these ideas with London Gophers.

Here’s a fun list of people to check out and who helped me out over the past couple days, apologies if I’ve missed you. Note: I’m not sure which socials to use, so I’ll be linking the ones I have.

Afzaal Ahman Zeeshan
Amy Mbaegbu (Twitter)
Brandon West (Twitter)
Ben Greenberg (Twitter)
Carla Sofia (Twitter)
Cat McGee (Twitter)
Daniel Bryant (Twitter)
Don Goodman-Wilson (Mastodon)
Emma Saroyan
Floor Drees (Twitter)
JP Haung (Twitter)
Karin Wolok (Twitter)
Kevin Lewis (Twitter, Mastodon)
Manuela Maranhāo
Matthew Revell (Twitter)
Nancy Chauhan (Twitter)
Rebecca Marshburn (Twitter)

I Enjoyed Giving My Talk

This was the book-end to something that had started way back in July 2022. Here’s some hidden lore: The reason I was talking to my friend about interviews in the first place is because I was having a hard-think about transitioning to Developer Relations.

(Photo Credit: Ben Greenberg (Twitter))

That conversation led to this article, which I wrote a month into being unemployed after quitting my former job to pursue Developer Advocacy full time. Which led to me submitting to DevRelCon without ever having a job in DevRel.

I believe my thoughts at the time were, not only would it allow me to increase the spread of the article’s message (as I had around 10? followers around that time), but I’d also be able to talk to others within the DevRel community to understand if I could get a job with the experience I had.

Funnily enough, I ended up being hired at JetBrains around 3 weeks before the conference started. This meant that I was now representing my company and talking about a topic that has a lot of varying opinions.

So yea, I got nervous. I was still functional, but I couldn’t eat, sleep or focus very well the entire time I was in Prague.

I think it was because it was an audience of my future peers and those who have been doing DevRel a fair bit longer than I have. Plus, there were many people in the room who had done a lot of work toward Diversity and Inclusion to help get it to where it is today.

(Confession: I had to jump to take this picture)

Conversely, as mentioned in the talk, I hadn’t really put that much thought into Diversity and Inclusion or spoken about it publicly. I was choosing to live my life with the cards life had given me. The world would change around me and I would adapt as required. However, in reference to my article and the presentation, this talk was me attempting to stand up and show support.

When the crowd stood up and clapped at the end, it was definitely an emotive moment that resonated with me. Hopefully, some of what I said resonated with others and can help them along their journey. The same as how those who have shared their journeys with me, brought me to the point where I am now. And I hope in the future, I can stand with others more than I did before.

Thanks again for having me and for being such a lovely audience!

Parts That Were Not So Awesome!

My Social Media Game is Weak

It wasn’t until a few hours after I’d done my talk that I realized several people had tweeted about it. Then I realized I had done no live-tweeting or tooting about the entire event.

I’ve not yet trained the urge to post to social media, as I only joined this year (I figured in an advocacy role you needed it). I had an Instagram account, but that was for stand-up comedy and I only started that last year (I don’t use it anymore). However, I think over time I’ll probably get better at sharing the love and appreciation for those on stage to social media.

My Picture Game Is Hella Weak

I hardly took any pictures of Prague and the event itself. Considering London Gophers now has an average of 'a lot' of photos taken per event, I am disappointed in my 'hardly-any' photos taken over the past 4 days. Tsk Tsk.

I Didn’t Take My Advice When Answering Questions

I’m likely in my head about this, but when it came time for questions, I was asked two questions that I didn’t have any frame of reference for and the correct thing to do in that situation was to say “I don’t know”.

I literally did a talk two weeks ago where someone asked me about this very situation, and I gave that answer. Furthermore, an hour before I was due to go on stage, someone else gave me that advice. Yet, when staring down the barrel of my own ignorance towards what was asked of me I said “bet”.

(I need to stop using this image so much, but I love it)

I’ll get over my embarrassment towards this, but some lessons are better absorbed on the field and this was one of those times. If you don’t know, you don’t know and it’s ok to admit that.

That’s All Folks

Honestly, DevRelCon Prague 2022 was pretty amazing all round. Will I go again? Yes. Plus, I want to go over several of the recordings so I can properly absorb the information that was said during the conference.

From nailing your origin story, to lowering the bar for your users becoming advocates themselves, to using creative non-technical techniques to build your brand, there was a wealth of information and knowledge shared by industry professionals that were 100% worth listening to.

Thank you to all the organizers, the sponsors, the event staff, the audio crew, the speakers and all the attendees as well as anyone I've missed for making it a very memorable experience for me and everyone else who came along. See y’all eventually 👍🏾.

November Gophers: The Rundown

Benjamin Bryant — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 12:26:08 +0000

Last week, we hosted London Gophers at SaltPay! It was their first time hosting a meetup and they smashed it out of the park! We additionally had a first-time speaker who did an absolutely fantastic presentation, I genuinely didn’t realize it was their first-time until after the event.

This ‘rundown’ will be lighter than the last as some points brought up in October’s retrospective are still ongoing and being worked on.

Things That Went Hunky-Dory

Our Adaptability Has Improved

This time round there were several unforeseen circumstances that previously would’ve made it difficult for us to deliver the same quality of meetup. As an example, there were a few WI-FI issues, we forgot to record on zoom, a speaker had a last-minute emergency among a few other things.

However, the processes we had in place and the backup options we’ve been working on still allowed the meetup to go ahead as if nothing had really gone wrong in the background. A real-life ‘chaos engineering’ exercise.

Unexpected events come with the territory of community organization and we hope to take some lessons from this event and continue to improve ourselves.

Got To Shake Of The Speaker Rust Before Next Week

Next week I’m speaking at DevRelCon which is becoming more real-er by the minute. For November Gophers there was a lack of talk submissions, so I put together a brief talk about talks, to inspire those who have thought about speaking, but haven’t applied yet.

It was nice to shake off the Rust, although it was obviously a friendly audience as most knew who I was and so I may not have taken it that seriously, compared to the first talk I ever did at London Gophers. Here’s a link to the talk, if you’re curious.

Things That Went Not-So-Hunky-Dory

We Need A Central Hub For Communications

Right now we’re split across Meetup, Gopher Slack, YouTube and Twitter. With what’s occurred at Twitter it made us realize we’ve been overly reliant on external communication channels for people to know what’s going on at the Meetup.

I think perhaps having a central point and then letting that information fan down to the others sites may be a better approach. It may also make adding to and moving from different social channels easier. In conclusion, we’re going to be refurbishing the gophers.london website.

It uses Hugo, ‘The world’s fastest framework for building websites’, so hopefully it won’t be too tricky to update our website and the information on it.

We’re also updating our banner to include quick links to our website and how to contact us. Below is a mock up of half of the banner. The 2nd half is a secret for now. Anywho, once all the links on the banner actually work, we’ll start to use the banner on our current and future socials.

That's All for Now

I’m unfortunately going to miss the Go X Rust Christmas Party next week (Team Go RSVP) (Team Rust RSVP), but I’m really looking forward to catching the videos, the talks and Q&A. Luckily, I did get to help out in my own way by creating this:

Have a lovely day and thanks for reading!

Go: Around The World - London, UK - An Introduction

Benjamin Bryant — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 08:30:33 +0000

Hello! Today I’d like to introduce an idea for a series of articles I’m going to be working on for the next few months. Go: Around The World. Starting in London, because well, I live there.

Last week, I went to Imperial Lates: Tiny Science. It was a showcase of some of the research the PHD students had been conducting at Imperial College London.

To be honest, I didn’t stay too long, nothing against the event, I just felt quite tired. However, I had time to catch a talk about stick insects.

“Explore the micro-scale science of how stick insects clamber up walls, and how this could inspire tomorrow’s medical plasters and wall-climbing robots.” - A quote from the website

A bit of the talk went over my head, but I had a small opportunity to talk to the researcher afterwards, as I wanted to figure out how they gathered their data. Did they use coding, or microscopes or… coding? Were they working with live insects? (Yes, and now I know more about stick insects than I originally would’ve liked).

This is the part where astute readers may guess that this person was using Go to do their research. Alas, no. They were using Python. But it made me wonder, what if they were using Go? Or to put it another way, even though I know researchers use Python for Data Analysis, I never would’ve guessed it was being used for research into how stick-insects selectively ‘stick’ to things.

So, what about Go? What Go projects are people working on that I wouldn’t even think of? And what inspired those projects?

When I pitched the idea to myself it sounded fun to write about. How the idea will take shape is a different ballgame entirely. I haven’t yet decided if interviewing or picking out interesting projects I find around the web is the better approach. Porque no los dos?

According to The State of Go (written in 2021), in terms of Go Developers around the world there are 180k in North America, 63k in South America, 243k in Europe, 38k in Africa, 570k in Asia and 132k in Oceania. Makes you wonder what wonders could be out there.

Well, I’m going to see if I can find out! This series of articles will unfortunately not be a weekly occurrence as life is going to be getting busier and busier, and with Christmas around the corner I’ll probably be ramping down a bit for the holidays.

Anywho, thanks for reading and see you at the next one!

P.S: If there’s anyone who you think I should try to get in touch with, or a project I could take a look into please do let me know!

Also, you can follow me on Mastodon: @Jaminologist@mstdn.social

The Road To Advocacy - Jet Set Go!

Benjamin Bryant — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 16:20:16 +0000

Back in July 2022, I created a personal website and wrote this article The Road To Advocacy - Or How To Effectively Manage Your Quarter Life Crisis.

On Tuesday, I started my first role as a Developer Advocate @Jetbrains.

Woo!

However, this is step one of a mountainous stepladder. There is still a fair amount of work to do before I have a fuller understanding of the role, as well as how to perform it effectively. That's why I wanted to look back, before heading forward to review what’s happened since I started.

So, You Wanna Go Over The Last 4 Months?

References to my first article aside, yes. To a degree. Let’s begin!

Writing

In total I’ve written 17 articles and have stuck to my once a week timeline. Most of the readers on my website come from LinkedIn/Twitter which means they’re mostly my friends and people I know.

Once I started cross-posting to Dev.to I could see the reactions of people who don’t know me personally, but as I have not yet written anything that has gained significant traction, I don’t have a clear idea on how my writing is being received. Still, I’ve found it incredibly cathartic to have an outlet to write about the things I’ve encountered in life.

I need to keep working on figuring out my niche and the content the Go/Tech Community may find useful and engaging to read, as well as the content I find fun to write, but that will come with time. As my workload increases, the once a week target may end, but I’ve found writing enjoyable so far.

Video Production

It was quite time-consuming as a novice. I made three videos in the first couple months. One was personal, the others were for interviews and my portfolio. I love it as an art-form, but I wish I could make a perfectly edited video without spending multiple hours/days putting it together.

I’ve been able to use these skills to produce the London Gopher speaker recordings and thankfully those aren’t as time-consuming.

With an exciting enough idea I could go back into personal video production, but it’s definitely not my primary focus at this point in time.

Community Organization

I am enjoying helping to organize London Gophers. It's interesting trying to resurrect something that hadn’t been around for two years. We have to ask ourselves so many questions. What worked before? Is there anything we want to remove? Do we need to change things? What don’t we currently know that we should know?

It’s a peculiar type of problem solving and trying to rebuild a welcoming social space differs a fair amount from completing another JIRA ticket.

Social Media

I still don’t understand how to use it to engage with the community. I don’t mind reading through threads and seeing the ideas that people are sharing, but on my side I kind of just post articles and return to what I was doing, which I know isn’t the best way to do it.

Growing up, I never developed the urge to want to post about what I was doing so it’s a weird space to enter this late in the game, especially as it’s changed a lot over the years. (and the past two weeks).

I only started using Instagram and Facebook last year, for open-mic comedy purposes and I joined Twitter when I made that first article and now Mastodon may or may not be a thing, so I’m tip-toeing into there as well.

Perhaps switching my mindset to focus on using these tools to keep in touch with the people I’ve met and to understand the community I’m in may be the better way to go.

So, You Looking Forward to Being a Developer Advocate?

Well, it’s been two days. Seems good so far.

If you’d prefer a longer answer. Yes, I am. But, I know it won’t be easy and I know there are several things I don’t know and some things I know may be things I shouldn't know. You know?

First things first, I am going to buy some cake.

Thanks for reading!

The Short Story Behind This Photograph

Benjamin Bryant — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 14:00:56 +0000

Back in 2016, according to the picture’s metadata, I took this photo of a friend somewhere in Wales. As with many things we carry through life, it has a particular sentimental value to me. Which I will now exploit for a writing prompt.

During university, I joined a climbing club and went on one of their weekend trips. Near the end we went to this abandoned quarry and when we reached the place we were going to climb, I knew I wouldn’t be getting involved. The wall they’d be climbing was around a few meters away from a sheer drop and I was never a fan of heights. A fact I discovered on my first day joining the club and a fact I seem to forget often.

As we were due to be there for a few hours, I looked around for something else to explore and I saw a staircase leading up the side of another part of the quarry and, from a distance, I could see a guardrail that followed the stairs up. I asked a couple of my friends, who also weren’t climbing, to come along and explore it with me. It seemed safe enough and less dangerous than hanging out near the edges of a cliff.

The thing is, and I need to reiterate. This was an abandoned quarry. Guardrails? Really? As we made our way up the staircase I noticed, far too late and around halfway up the climb, that this ‘guardrail’ was actually abandoned and disused equipment that from a far looked like a guardrail, but up close wasn’t even attached to the staircase and was twisting its way down another sheer drop.

I was now in the same position I had tried to avoid, standing a meter away from a fatal fall. Now, to be clear, I wasn’t in any danger. Well, if someone shoved me or if Zeus summoned a localized hurricane specifically targeted at me, I may have fallen to my death. Alas, those were the thoughts that gave way to the next set of events.

Suddenly aware of my mortality, the ‘raging’ winds and my generally all-encompassing-yet-surprisingly-easy-to-ignore fear of death. I descended into a mini panic-attack. Crying, yelling and everything in between. Not the most gracious look, but one I have pulled off many times.

Now, I remember little, but my two friends were there and were quite supportive as I melted down. Even though they probably wanted to keep going since, again, we weren’t actually in any danger at all. They took their time to reassure me and even offered to go back down.

However, my friend (the one in the picture) said one thing that stuck out to me and still is in the back of my mind. I have lost the precise words to time, but it was something like this:

“We can go back down, but are you sure? I think what’s going to happen is that if we go back down you’re going to regret the fact that we went back down, because you know there’s nothing to be afraid of. As long as you know you will not regret it then we can go back down.”

In honesty, I remember it being shorter, punchier and less AI grammar-checked than that. But, history is written by the person currently writing it. Their words resonated with me because I genuinely wanted to finish the climb up the stairs. The only thing that was stopping me was well, me.

So I crawled. I couldn’t bring myself to stand but if I kept crawling up, I’d be closer to the top than if I sat still. Eventually and with the support of my friends we made it to a plateau and away from the drop. I think I ran into the plateau just to get as far away from the edge as possible.

We explored the plateau and found more abandoned buildings and equipment and wide steps leading to two pillars which from a certain angle, with the sun setting, made an excellent photo opportunity.

Unfortunately, when it was my turn to be in the photo, my stance and the framing was a lot less marketable.

Still, I see this photo as a reward for choosing to do something, even though I found it scary and I refer to this lesson every so often. It reminds me to try things I’m unsure or afraid of, sometimes. Or at least understand why I’m unsure or afraid of those things. As well as the value of having support to fall back on.

I mean, I don’t always stick to this mantra and things could always go badly if you choose to stay the course. I mean, there are people who backed out of climbing Everest and probably regret it, but the number of ghosts up there may have regretted choosing to go on.

But whatever, I like the photo lol.

Thanks for reading

P.S. I surprisingly didn’t panic on the way back down, in fact it no longer felt scary at all.

This is me, Getting on the Mat

Benjamin Bryant — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 15:06:51 +0000

Short story. Over the early pandemic I joined a writing group to produce one of the many, many, many lockdown novels that were created during that time frame. I started it as a part of the NaNoWriMo challenge (writing 50,000 words in November) and eventually self-published the final version on Kindle six months later.

In order to complete the challenge you have to write around 1667 words per day. Some can stick to it, some start slow and then write in bulk near the end, some do the opposite and some give up.

Did I stick to 1667 words per day? Of course not.

Below is my daily word tally for the rough draft. The lowest days are around 400 words and one of the highest is around 4000.

I did the challenge a second time a month later, in order to complete the rewrite, this was the world tally.

Definitely a larger range of highs and lows and some days I didn’t write a single word. However, I know that every day I at least opened my laptop and looked.

Before the writing group started the challenge, there was an initial meeting to discuss strategies and share tips and tricks. Something someone said stuck out to me. This person talked about how they’d started exercising and how trying to stick to the writing challenge felt similar.

They had an exercise schedule that they committed to doing every day, there were some days they could push themselves to go further, some days where they’d do less and some days where they wouldn’t do anything at all.

However, no matter what they would at least stand on the mat. That’s it. They’d get the mat out, stand on it and then put the mat away. It allowed them not to lose the habit of the routine. Even if they weren’t initially feeling it, just by getting on the mat, it sometimes motivated them to do something and even if it didn’t, at least they got on the mat.

They wouldn’t focus on trying to hit the goal of 1667 words every day, they’d do what they could.

I carried that with me during the challenge and there were days where I wasn’t feeling it, but by at least opening a new chapter or looking at an old one, as I did every day, sometimes I’d be able to just start writing. And even when I didn't, that'd be ok too, since I knew I’d be back tomorrow.

Obviously, my current goal of writing an article once per week is a lot less strenuous. It's a goal I’ll stick to until the next one comes along. Some days I open my word processor, pop in a title and then think, “nah”. Then the next day I do the same thing and I can put together something new. Sometimes I write a lot, sometimes I write a little, sometimes I write nothing at all.

Anyway, that’s kind of what spawned this article. It wasn’t the one I wanted to write this week, but I couldn’t think of the words for that one. Perhaps I will the next week, or the week after, or maybe I’ll never think of them at all. However, popping something like this down allowed me to stick with the habit.

Now, I don’t know if I’ll ever publish a blank article…

But yea. This is me, getting on the mat.

October Gophers: The Rundown

Benjamin Bryant — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 15:50:24 +0000

Last week we hosted October Gophers at Checkout.com. And it went great! The talks were all fantastic; the venue looked amazing, and I even made this pretty collage.

"We Are Greater Together!" What a smashing night! How many Gophers can you spot?

Thanks Ryan, Amy-Elizabeth and @LukeStoward for the incredible talks, to all you lovely guests and of course our illustrious hosts @Checkout!

Videos to be released soon! Next meetup is Nov 23rd! pic.twitter.com/TeL84ETUzI

— LondonGophers (@LondonGophers) October 20, 2022

Now you may look at this and think. "Damn, seems like a pretty cool event right?" Wrong! Just kidding, it was!

However, we can always strive to improve and check in with ourselves to see if there’s anything we can do better next time, or understand what’s going well.

Oh and to preface, this is entirely from my perspective as an organizer of London Gophers and not the opinion of London Gophers or any of their attendees.

Things That Went Hunky-Dory

Priority Queue

This was our first time testing this system out and, at least as a first impression, it seemed to go over well and the people I’ve asked like the idea.

Morning all! RSVPs for October Gophers are opening on Wednesday, Oct 5th at 10:30am!

Also! To give more opportunity to those who are underrepresented in tech, we are going to be trailing a new system! pic.twitter.com/xL0SMuke2G

— LondonGophers (@LondonGophers) October 3, 2022

It wasn’t difficult to keep track of the number of reserved seats either but if we ever return to hosting meetups that are 200-300 people strong will that change?

In terms of stats, of the 20 seats we reserved we reached 17 before we hit cut-off point to release the remaining seats. Which is better than I initially expected. As it’s still early days, we’ll see how the system progresses, but it’s certainly a good start.

RSVP Reminders

This time around we sent out RSVP reminders asking our attendees to please update their RSVPs if they couldn’t make it and explained how we’d be keeping track of attendance and giving away the spots of serial offenders to those on the waitlist.

Which helped, as after sending out the communication I think around 30 people, over time, moved their RSVP from ‘going’ to ‘not going’ which meant at least 30 additional people from the 70+ people on the waitlist could now attend the event. This rate of RSVP updating was a lot higher than our last event, but unfortunately I don’t have hard data to show that the reminders did anything, or if anyone even saw them.

We still had several no-shows, but it’s one of those statistics that I don’t think will ever be zero. It’s a free event, the only barrier to entry is making an account on Meetup, there aren’t strong penalties for not showing up and anything can happen at the last minute. All we can do is try to mitigate the drop-off rate as best as we can.

Increased Communication

This is something we are still working on, but I think we’re getting better at it. During the meetup we had slides explaining how you can contact London Gophers, as well as how the meetup follows the Go Community Code of Conduct.

We may need to go further, but it’ll take time and mistakes to see which areas we aren’t clear and what information is hard to find.

For example, is it easy for someone who wishes to talk at London Gophers to find out how to do so, where to submit and what/how to submit? I’d say yes, but that’s because I have full context on it. I do not know what the context is like for our attendees.

Our Recording Equipment Has Improved

I invested in a wireless microphone and for 1 of the 3 recordings I did I set it up correctly and it sounded pretty alright. Which is good, as some venues can not record so we can continue to rely on ourselves to create a recording and have the audio not sound completely tragic.

Unfortunately, I only set it up correctly once. The other times I messed it up and my camera died later into the night so we had to use the backup Zoom recording audio.

Things That Went Not-So-Hunky-Dory

How We Handle The Register

Since the restart, 3 different venues have hosted London Gophers. All have required some kind of register of attendees for security, which makes sense. If there’s a fire, you need to make sure you know how many people are in the building.

And we also need a register so we can keep track of who attended and the rate of drop-off. You may wonder why this is important. In short, one way to combat drop-offs rates is to overbook.

If, for example, you’re aiming for 100 attendees and you know from experience that no matter what you do you will always have a 20% drop-off, you can instead book for 120. (GCSE Math coming in clutch there). However, some venues require data in order to allow for that and on the off chance 120 show up, we still need to accommodate for that.

Anyway, we couldn’t use this new feature on Meetup. So, all we had were CSV spreadsheets, which we sent to the venue. However, because of a small administrative error, the security were still using a list from a week ago.

Thankfully, this was solved quite painlessly (updated to the new list), but it brought up another minor issue.

RSVP updates can happen late. Which means even if a venue gets the attendance list a day beforehand, on the day of the event, Meetup may move attendees into ‘going’ because of someone updating their RSVP to ‘not going’ on the day.

If this attendee then turns up, they might not be on the register even though it’s only a day old.

We’re still deciding how we might handle this, but we think communicating the ‘cut-off’ point for when we send the register might be a good idea. As in, we have a fixed time we send the register to the venue and make our attendees, as well as the venues, aware of this.

What would be more fantastic is if there was like a living, collaborative register or something we could share with the venue. For paid music events, for example, there are QR codes and scannable tickets. So even last-minute tickets can enter the event. Security doesn’t need a list of names, it just needs to see a ticket.

Surely there’s some kind of version of that for free events? One that doesn’t require a ticket? I don’t know, but would love a hint. I’m sure this is a solved problem, we just don’t know what the answer/tool to use is yet.

How I Close Out Speakers

This one is more of a ‘me’ thing if you watch the latest videos of the October Gophers meetup. I noticed at the end of each of the speaker’s talks/questions the crowd didn’t really know when to applause. I funnily enough covered this before from when I was helping to host a room at GopherCon UK.

I need to learn to say final statements. Such as, “and can we have another round of applause for X!” The audience wants to clap, they just don’t know when to and I’m not helping by shuffling up awkwardly and saying ‘thanks for the talk’ while grabbing the microphone back.

That’s it

Did other things happen? Yes, probably, but articles can’t last forever. I’ll likely keep striving along with the team at London Gophers to see in what ways we can continue to improve and make the whole event both seamless and welcoming to our attendees, the venue hosts and future organizers.

Thanks for reading!

What is a Proposal Document and Why is it Awesome for Meetups?

Benjamin Bryant — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 16:02:14 +0000

A Proposal Document is a baseline set of requirements for a meetup that lists both its values and benefits. You can send this document to anybody interested in hosting your meetup and to any higher-ups in the organization that may need to approve costs.

It allows you to define what exactly your meetup's needs are, as well as, give perspective on the different benefits others may see in your meetup.

It is a useful tool for initiating conversations about hosting a meetup, as it allows everyone to know what the expectations are before any discussion takes place, meaning there is less risk of unexpected surprises.

What does it solve?

One tricky aspect of hosting a meetup is, well, finding a place to host. From online to in-person, small to humongous there are costs involved in running a meetup and someone has to fit the bill somewhere.

Now depending on who this someone or someones is, they may expect some level of return on their investment, or a way to justify the costs.

Behind the scenes at London Gophers, we don’t magically end up with 100 people entering different companies every month and being served food and drinks, without there being at least one meeting beforehand. I think it would be rude to simply show up.

This is where the proposal document comes in. It allows companies who are interested, or companies we are interested in, to assess quickly whether they can host.

London Gophers Proposal Document

This is an older example of the London Gophers Proposal Document. It is aimed toward those within recruitment/management/HR who will likely be the ones who will have final say in confirming the costs of hosting a meetup and whether it is worth it for the company. We’ve made a couple changes since, but are open to hearing feedback.

London Gophers Meetup Opportunity

Communities are one of today's leading software development drivers. Knowledge is shared, discussions happen, and projects are born within. They are grown online, through Slack/Discord/IRC, and offline, mainly through conferences and meetups.

Go has a significant and growing community, especially with more companies adopting it. London Gophers (Go developers meetup) used to host 300 people meetups monthly pre-COVID, promoting discussions about best practices, feature demos and more general tech talks.

We plan to return from Q3 onwards, and the following document details how your company can benefit by hosting London Gophers.

Why London Gophers?

If your company is interested in hiring Go engineers today or in the near future, it could be a way to showcase to the community your company proposition and potential roles.
By hosting events, the company creates brand awareness, where engineers might not only associate it with Go but with the product or service that the company provides.
It is a low-cost opportunity to create brand awareness and potentially improve the recruitment pipeline.
Engineers at all levels attend our meetup. From Junior, to Site Reliability Engineers (SREs).

What are the benefits?

Ability to talk about the company during the Meetup (5-10 minutes). It is open to any subject, such as talking about the product/service or roles that might interest the community.
We will prioritize the company's speakers for subsequent meetups if there are engineers keen to bring up a talk to London Gophers. Bear in mind this will not be on the same day the company is hosting the event.
Brand awareness through the community. It is beneficial for companies who provide services that developers can use. For example, dev tooling, payment solutions, database services, etc.

What is required?

A space that is large enough for 50-100 people. As we are restarting the meetup, we are not expecting as many people as before. At our first Meetup (20th July), we had around 50 people.
- Optionally, mic and speakers if the space is too large.
A projector or TV that we can plug a laptop into.
Seats for the attendees.
Let us know in advance about clearance and security requirements.
- We can provide the list of attendees' names before the event. We can only give emails if an attendee approves us giving their email and you can only use it for clearance purposes.
- Optionally, security support (depends on the requirements, currently we are only two organisers).
One company employee to introduce the company in the initial section of the meetup (5-10 minutes). We can include the company's slides in the "A Message from our hosts" section.
Optionally, Developers who can be around to represent the organisation, as some attendees might have questions about the company's technology, proposition and open roles.
Food and drinks.
Optionally, the company can provide branded goodies (eg: stickers and T-shirts).

What do you think? As an organiser it helped us to nail down what exactly London Gophers needed in order to run a night and it helped us identify what we were and weren’t comfortable with.

For example, with 4a) we’ve had companies in the past request if we could share attendee emails, but that’s something we will never do. It will always be the choice of an attendee whether they wish to share their email with a company.

The ‘Proposal Document’ is definitely something we could expand the use of and it is still being tweaked as we move forward with the restart of London Gophers. In this version we don't make mention of the Go Community Code of Conduct and how the meetup follows it. Which is something we will be adding in newer versions.

Furthermore, we could have other documents for other situations. For example, we could have one for speakers, or sponsors, or crossover events or anything, really. It’s simply a tool to enter a discussion with both sides already aware of what is needed to come to an agreement.

After which, any points that might not work can be discussed and we can address anything that needs further explanation. Then all that’s left is deciding on what the next steps are.

Thanks for reading. You can follow me @Jaminologist on Twitter.

What Are Your Tips For First-Time Speakers?

Benjamin Bryant — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 07:03:21 +0000

Short one this week, but in my defence, I was in the middle of penning two different articles and by ‘penning’ I mean I’ve written the titles and stopped experimenting with the font.

Anyhow, one speaker due to talk at our next tech event emailed me to ask, “Any advice for a first-time speaker?”

It was a weird introspective moment for me, as I realized I had now reached a point where I was at the opposite end of a question. After thinking about what to say, I replied to the email with this:

My Advice to a First-Time Speaker

Know why you're giving the talk and stick to the point throughout. An audience can lose interest if a talk feels undirected.
Practice, practice, practice. Once you have it ready, go over it a few times. It'll help improve your confidence and allow you to return easily to what you were saying if you go off-script.
Everyone wants you to succeed. Have you ever watched a talk and hoped that it went badly? No? That's how everyone else feels as well. Everyone wants you to do well and will forgive if there are any mistakes or problems so don't worry too much about messing up.
Keep it simple. Putting a Wikipedia article's level of information on a single slide, is quite difficult for anyone to absorb. There's a certain art in being able to talk about complex topics in a succinct, yet understandable way.
Arrive Early. It can give you time to familiarize yourself with the venue, address any technical issues and an opportunity to relax before you go up there and slay. If you find that you’re going to be late, communicate. Let the organizers know and they’ll appreciate it more than radio silence.
Have fun! It's your first time speaking, that's a really cool milestone! Few have the guts to give it a go. Don't think too much about creating the bestest thing ever, but focus on creating something you would enjoy showing and speaking about to others. People enjoy it when the person on stage seems genuine and enthusiastic about what they are presenting.

What would you say?

This advice is an amalgamation of things I’ve picked up from others, talks I’ve enjoyed and from my time doing open-mic comedy.

I was curious what advice you would give if someone asked you? And if you’re due to give your first talk soon, was any of this useful?

That’s all for now, have a cool day and thanks for reading.

DEV Community: Benjamin Bryant

Building Communities - Women in Cloud Native

The Drive Behind The Idea

It Takes A Community To Build A Community.

Collaboration

Preparation

Action

The Fun Begins

The Future Is In Clouds

Resources and Links

Signing Off

In Go, How Do You Train Your Fun-damentals?

50% Rule

Giving It A Try

Overcoming the Fear of An Empty Code Editor

Can You Overcome The Perceived Pointlessness of Play?

Anyway, those are my current thoughts

Go: Around The World - Oslo, Norway - Climate Action and Consultancies

So, what did we talk about?

Climate Action & Go!

& Go…?

London Gophers Versus Go Oslo User Group. Ready…? Fight!

The Importance of Community For Growth

Thank you, Marta!

Resources

Other links:

My DevRelCon Prague 2022 - A Quick Recap

Parts That Were Awesome!

The bit where the plane bursts through the clouds

Prague’s Cool

The Supportiveness of the Community and The Event

I Enjoyed Giving My Talk

Parts That Were Not So Awesome!

My Social Media Game is Weak

My Picture Game Is Hella Weak

I Didn’t Take My Advice When Answering Questions

That’s All Folks

November Gophers: The Rundown

Things That Went Hunky-Dory

Our Adaptability Has Improved

Got To Shake Of The Speaker Rust Before Next Week

Things That Went Not-So-Hunky-Dory

We Need A Central Hub For Communications

That's All for Now

Go: Around The World - London, UK - An Introduction

The Road To Advocacy - Jet Set Go!

So, You Wanna Go Over The Last 4 Months?

Writing

Video Production

Community Organization

Social Media

So, You Looking Forward to Being a Developer Advocate?

The Short Story Behind This Photograph

This is me, Getting on the Mat

October Gophers: The Rundown

Things That Went Hunky-Dory

Priority Queue

RSVP Reminders

Increased Communication

Our Recording Equipment Has Improved

Things That Went Not-So-Hunky-Dory

How We Handle The Register

How I Close Out Speakers

That’s it

What is a Proposal Document and Why is it Awesome for Meetups?

What does it solve?

London Gophers Proposal Document

London Gophers Meetup Opportunity

What Are Your Tips For First-Time Speakers?

My Advice to a First-Time Speaker

What would you say?