Developer Roadshow Starts in the Midwest
Follow me in 2017 as I get on planes trains & automobiles to be part of the community I serve
What a kick off! We started our first Mozilla Developer Roadshow event in sunny Kansas City. The crowd turned out strong at the Google Fiber building with many from our Google Developer Group community joining us before their annual DevFest KC event downtown. Three awesome Mozillian speakers, Luke, Greg, Josh, covered topics on web security, webGL, and the open platform; they took to stage to let everyone know that Mozilla is not just Firefox.
Check out speakers’ content now uploaded on our Roadshow Github repo, and watch their talks again on my Twitter account.
Some of our Mozilla Foundation folks were present, as well as members of Gigabit Community Fund grant recipients. I was very impressed to connect with the VFormAlliance teachers who are taking Mozilla powered A-Frame webVR tech directly into the classrooms in Kansas City.
It wasn’t all work! The DevFest event at the beautiful Brass building in downtown KC was a treat.
And then, of course, we had to have BBQ. And it wasn’t just any BBQ. The speakers and organizers of the Roadshow and DevFest patiently stood in line to taste the world famous OK Joe’s ribs and brisket — folks, it was glorious.
Sunday morning, we wrapped it up, hugged all around, and hop in the car to head down to stop #2: Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Four hours later, and pretty much no traffic on yet another sunny and warm (I think it was 70F?? In FEBRUARY!) Midwest Sunday afternoon, we prepped for our second Roadshow at the “basecamp for entrepreneurs” 36 Degrees N. Before the evening kicked off, we invested several hours connecting with the Tulsa and regional tech and civic leaders, all curious to learn more about Mozilla and our Roadshow initiatives. Again, I was just floored with how the community received us with such welcome. Techloahoma was represented. And so did some of the city’s civic leaders, including Tulsa’s own favorite geek mayor, G.T Bynum. It’s still cool to meet the Mayor and have the honor of shaking his hand! I was also introduced to Muskogee WebDevs, Learn to Code, and Oklahoma Women in Tech through Diana Varnes, teacher as well as leader in the region.
Again, we shared our web tech knowledge with a community ready to go beyond the web standards of yester-years (is that a word? i might have made it up…but I like it). And we had a lively Q&A session supplied by Luke’s A-class pitching arm soaring our cute red and blue dinos into the crowd.
Check our the Q&A session on Periscope and try to see if you can catch that awesome throw!
Huge thanks to Civic Ninjas founder and champion of driving Tulsa tech-forward, Scott Phillips, for connecting all the dots for us! And thanks to Luke Crouch for gathering the regional meetup and community leads together to leverage this opportunity to learn from each other. Thanks to our intrepid Mozillian Yury Delendik who continued on to speak about WebAssembly at the OKC.js meetup, our third stop on the Roadshow!
What’s next? I’m headed down for a week of GDC madness in SF starting Feb 27th (find me, say hello! but don’t sneak up, ok? that’s creepy). And then, it’s onto our next event at the Mozilla Portland office. Keep up with the Roadshow schedule and more on our Hacks blog.
