DevOps Represent 2022 Review
Let’s take a look at this massive year and celebrate all the awesome stuff we have achieved as a community.
Let’s take a look at the data. Our Slack community continues to grow, we now have 582 members, which is an increase of around 60 members; triple our growth from 2021. Our Twitter account has 1,916 followers, which is just over 300 more than last year. Our MeetUp group now has 1024 members, which is an increase of 148 people.
Our numbers definitely reflect our increased activity, more events and more people discovering us. We haven’t returned to our numbers prior to COVID, which is expected. It definitely looks like we’re recovering and people are hopefully regaining the energy to engage in tech community activities.
The Rebrand
This year was massive for the identity of our community. We rebranded from ‘DevOps Girls’ to ‘DevOps Represent’. We wrote about our reasons and how we were going to approach the rebrand earlier in the year. We are stoked to say things are very positive so far.
As part of the rebrand, we expanded our core group of organisers and welcomed 2 new people. Thank you to Leo and Bridget for taking on the responsibility to continue to grow our community.
Workshops
In total, our community ran 6 workshops across the year. We did a mix of virtual-only, hybrid and in-person only. Our workshops are the core of our community and we love running them.
Ash and Nancy created a workshop on event-driven architecture and delivered that over Zoom 2 times. These were run on weekends to smaller groups keen to get their hands on working with AWS Lambda’s for alerting. We love having new contributors to our workshop content. Thanks so much to them committing time to make this happen alongside their day jobs. It’s not easy creating a workshop from scratch.
Our first hybrid event in years was a Docker and Kubernetes 101 workshop held at the SEEK HQ in Cremorne in July. It was facilitated by co-organiser JC and supported by an awesome crew of coaches from SEEK. It was very nerve racking running our first hybrid event, we had no idea what the turn out would be. Thankfully we had an awesome crew of folks turn up. You could really see the buzz of in-person networking and new connections being made.
In October, we resurrected an oldie, but a goodie — the AWS Cloud Networking Bootcamp. This was another hybrid event hosted by SEEK at their HQ in Cremorne. Last time we ran this in-person it was a massive event with a big turn out. Whilst we’re not back to pre-COVID numbers, we were still impressed with the turn out and engagement from the attendees. Shout out to Bridget taking the lead on facilitating this one. Thanks AWS for once again providing us with some vouchers too.
In November we had a guest facilitator run a workshop on Observability. This was run by Liz Fong-Jones, Field CTO for Honeycomb. This was such great in-depth content on a topic we haven’t run a workshop on before. As organisers, we are so grateful for Liz giving up her time to run this for our community. We would love to see more guest facilitators in 2023, so if that’s you, please get in touch.
Our last event for the year was a 2-day in-person Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Bootcamp hosted by Catch.com.au in their Melbourne CBD office. This was facilitated by the EduK8s group, thank you to trainers Alex Bukharov and Prateek Nayak. The event was organised by Innablr. The aim of this bootcamp is to prepare you for the CKA exam and gain a certification. More of these will be run in 2023, follow us on MeetUp for those announcements.
As organisers, we will continue to provide virtual, hybrid and in-person events. In all of these cases we aim to create safe and inclusive spaces for learning. If there’s something you’d like to see as part of our workshops, please get in touch — we’d love to hear your ideas.
Our in-person events can’t happen with out a venue, so thank you to SEEK and Catch for hosting and feeding us this year.
Partnerships
BSides Melbourne gifted 4 tickets to our community to attend their conference in September. BSides has been a long-time supporter of our community and we love their security events.
We were able to sponsor two members of Devops Represent in the Tech Lead Series to learn more about the role and relevant techniques in their journey to their next level. This sponsorship was possible thanks to the participation of Javier, one of our co-organizers as faculty member in the program. The value of this sponsorship was $1600 per person.
At the end of this year, we became a community partners for Programmable conference. This is a community partnership that will allow us to provide free tickets for members of our community. This conference is happening in Melbourne and Sydney in March 2023. We’ll be posting in the new year how you can apply to receive a free ticket to these events. We love the Programmable vision “… to achieve gender balance across speakers and attendees, maintains a focus on equality, openness and safety as well as emphasising the importance of community & human connection.” Hopefully we might see some of you there.
If you’d like to partner with us in 2023, please get in touch. We believe giving opportunities to members of our community is a great way to uplift marginalised genders for events and conferences.
What’s on for 2023?
Our organiser group will be sure to deliver more awesome events. Likely we will start the year to survey our members to ensure we’re still delivering relevant content.
Here’s some things we are looking forward to:
- We’re working with AWS folks to bring our much anticipated game day in the first half of 2023
- Run another Certified Kubernetes Administrator Bootcamp
- Giving out free tickets to Programmable conference
- Running a resume-writing and interview skills workshop
Massive thank you to our extended network of volunteers and coaches. We can’t do what we do without your support. Shout out to the SEEK folks who continually show up when we need the help.
From the organisers crew, we hope to see you at an event in 2023 — thanks for your continued support.
Franca, JC, Bridget, Leo, Theresa, Javier xoxo
