The Benefits of Sponsoring a Dev Meetup
For over six months now, XO in Austin has been sponsoring and organizing a developer focused meetup called ‘Fullstack Forum ATX’. The meetups generally have two speakers, are remote friendly, and focus on a broad range of topics from robotics to using Docker. This has provided a platform for engineers at XO who are interested in public speaking, as well as an opportunity for guest speakers to share their knowledge with the local development community.
XO engineers have delivered talks on a wide variety of topics from modern Web development, to the future of the Cloud. From New York, Sam Joli presented a talk on the advantages and basic implementation of GraphQL. Lam Chan discussed working with Docker and Kubernetes including some thoughts on the future of cloud computing. Andres Caicedo discussed the benefits of an event-driven email architecture, and Mario Harper gave a talk on building a static site with a cloud-hosted CMS. Many of these engineers had not previously given a public talk and used this experience to practice a new set of skills.
We were also lucky to be able to welcome a wide variety of guest speakers from the community. This includes Andrew Siemer talking about building a gulp pipeline for development, as well as Joe Wroten talking about imposter syndrome and how to combat it. Kassandra Perch gave a talk on “Server-less” functions, the Internet of Things, and also showed off several javascript based microcontroller platforms. These talks introduced new technology to XO employees as well as facilitated learning in the general Austin area.
Running the meetup has provided valuable learning, both directly from speakers as well as the ability to practice assembling and presenting talks. XO engineers have been able to interact more with the local development community and be exposed to technologies outside of our normal stack. In addition, running a meetup has provided us with more name and brand recognition in our local community.