Techbreakfast est. 2013: A story of many croissants

When we were founded in 2013, we had the ambition to be a developer-managed company. Technical excellence and modern technology have therefore always been a big part of us. But how do you anchor this in your culture and remain open to new technology? One answer for us was the establishment of the “OpenTechBreakfast” as a place of open exchange. A Brown Bag session in a different way!

But is that something for developers? Giving lectures, being social, not sitting at the computer? As it turned out: Yes! For almost 6 years this format has been extremely successful for us. Talk to colleagues about what’s on their minds, talk about what’s hot in the world of technology, or presenting the coolest projects. That simply hits a nerve. So here is a short story and many pictures from several years of TechBreakfast.

You can find out what we have learned from the organisation and implementation of TechBreakfast in an extra blog post!

2013: What is a Brown Bag session or a Learning Lunch?

A Brown Bag session is normally an event where participants eat while one topic is presented. In our case it was just a breakfast with coffee, rolls and croissants. Super early in the morning at 9 o’clock or later at 9.30 o’clock. The lectures are between 10 and 15 minutes long and we prefer shorter and more informal talks. Power Point? Just tell us! Or introduce us to your project and your code. That was our basic idea at the time: to promote exchange.

That’s why the registration for giving a talk was always uncomplicated: Anyone who wanted to introduce a topic simply registered on a wiki page. The whole thing looked like this:

A total of 12 OpenTechBreakfasts were held in 2013, in a sofa corner where there was some space. Here is a selection of the topics:

• 25.09.2013: Introduction meeting format “OpenTechBreakfast”
• 02.10.2013: Git for newbies, Introduction Mediahackday, Teamintroduction Welt Online Dev
• 09.10.2013: ART, SDP
• 16.10.2013: Media Hackday Result Presentation, REM
• 23.10.2013: Immutable Infrastructure, Provisioning with Chef
• 30.10.2013: cssConf, Design Thinking, Rebell
• 13.11.2013: Varnish and Varnish Day at Axel Springer HQ, Community of Practice @ideAS, How to get rid of expensive Backend developers
• 20.11.2013: Core Media Ops and Dev, ideAS Ventures — What is that?
• 27.11.2013: Digitale Mentoring, Technical visions at Star Trek and their implementation
• 04.12.2013: Calabash — Mobile Art, Knowledge dynamic in cross functional teams
• 11.12.2013: StarFish, Impact Mapping, The Celepedia Backend — The first 4 month
• 18.12.2013: Design at Celepedia, Swagger

2014: And every week the coffee says hello

A great year for the TechBreakfast: it took place 41 times in total! That was almost weekly, with the exception of a few skips. Since the number of spectators has also grown, it was moved more and more often to a large room in the Axel Springer Unternehmerclub (a penthouse). To do this, the building had to be changed, but as a neutral room it was also more accessible for everyone. Not only for our employees, but also for colleagues from other Axel Springer brands.

Here is a small selection of the topics:

• Why do we need “Frontend Devops”??
• Women in Media
• New Relic
• Go in a nutshell
• Continuous Performance Management
• Rapid Prototyping with Spring Boot
• Event Tracking mit Logstash + ElasticSearch + Kibana
• Agile Metrics

The whole list would be getting way too long! Because there were more than 100 talks that year. I also had my first talk in my professional career: “IntelliJ IDEA Version 14 — What’s New”. And that was exactly how a good lecture should be: Without slides. Because of that the preparation time is much short. The entrance hurdle should always be very low, so that all would dare to hold a talk.

2015: It gets bigger: OpenTechBreakfast becomes TechBreakfast

We as Ideas Engineering were getting smaller (and later also bigger again) as some of our teams worked on successful projects that were then spun off. As a result, not only Ideas Engineering could and wanted to organize the TechBreakfast, but it became a cooperation with other Axel Springer brands.

And so the “OpenTechBreakfast” became only “TechBreakfast”, primarily organized together with the colleagues from Welt und Bild. There were a total of 30 events in 2015, with two or three lectures per event.

• A report from the Silicon Valley
• REST with RAML
• Datadog
• Report from the FOSDEM
• Server-Side JavaScript
• Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD
• Web-Typographie
• Master the Art of CSS Fu — Part 1: How to write CSS Selectors
• How to become a better developer (without coding)

2016: Professionalization as a loss?

For 2016 we have organized the TechBreakfast 24 times. What’s really exciting is that the quality of the talks has changed. Overall, the presentations have become longer (20–30min) and more professional. Some of the lectures were so good that you could hold them at different conferences. A great year! Here is a selection of the topics:

• Varnish@BILD
• H/2 — the new cow in the village
• VIPER — Our Experience
• Tmux(P) in Action
• Kubernetes
• Domain-Driven-Design
• CSS-Grids
• Kotlin
• Optimization of a duck !!!
• DevOpsCon Recap
• Pipeline-as-code with Jenkinsfiles
• What’s new on iOS, tvOS, watchOS, macOS

And the downside? The entry hurdle has become higher. Nobody gives lectures without slides anymore. Longer presentations also mean more work in preparation. Especially beginning in the end of 2016, you will notice that the number of presentations is decreasing.

2017: A small slowdown

The high quality of the presentations in 2016 also had a disadvantage: it was more difficult to attract people as speakers. The bar was very high and so was the extra work for the colleagues. After 4 years of organizing, the motivation dropped. That’s also because the organization requires a lot of energy. And so the TechBreakfast was only monthly in 2017, because too many events were cancelled, as there were not enough talks. But we got support from our internal HR department “People & Culture”, who supported us in the organisation (and still are paying the room and breakfast ;) ).

In the beginning the claim was “spontaneous, short lectures, low-threshold”. The current high quality therefore caused some pain in 2017. So how do you manage to get more energy into the format again?

All in all a rather weak year, but with some great topics:

• Swagger and what came before
• Leveling up your React-App: Manage your State with Redux
• Performancetests with Gatling
• Live Templates in IntelliJ

2018: NewInTech as an additional format

In 2018 the TechBreakfast happened 12x and thus monthly. But there also was an additional format that has brought a breath of fresh air: NewInTech.

NewInTech is about lectures on technical topics, but for people who are new to this field. So Tech explained for non-techies. Here the talks are longer (30–60min) and the crowd is incredible big. It was always really crowded before.

• Trends in Digital Advertising
• AWS and the cloud
• Blockchain or the slowest database of the internet
• Artificial Intelligence
• Agile Demystified
• Silicon Valley Journey
• Cybercrime Myths

2019: Status Quo?

This year we will organize the TechBreakfast at least monthly. But there are also plans for more events happening! There are more than enough spectators and demand!

This article was originally published on the Ideas Engineering Tech Blog.