Ortenau.IT Meetups 2023
I’m pretty proud of myself because I became effective. I organised two local meetups here in Offenburg this year. Many other meetups started back in presence much earlier after COVID, but I still organised two! You have to know that these meetups are a private initiative of mine and my commitment is voluntary. And for such a meetup to take place, I need people to give a talk, a room where the meetup can take place and, of course, participants.
June Meetup»
In June I had everything together for another Meetup. I was supported by fellow colleagues, for which I am very grateful. Alex Schulze from Ergowerk sponsored the room, including snacks and drinks, and I really like this location because the office is really modern, beautifully furnished and offers a great atmosphere for networking.
And then there were two topics that evening. On the one hand, my colleague Sven Sanzenbacher from Valiton talked about his experience of breaking up a monolithic application and showed in a really great way that microservices bring a different kind of complexity with them, even though complexity is exactly what you wanted to beat in the first place.
I was happy to be able to win another former colleague and friend Sven Wurth with a second topic. He now calls himself a coach for good habits, which was very well reflected in his presentation. After the previously rather technical topic, this soft skill topic from the ‘coaching corner’ was a very entertaining demonstration of what a superpower habits can be. The title of the presentation ‘Biohacking for the toughest’ was absolutely well chosen.
October Meetup»
At the end of the June Meetup, Christian Stange offered to host the next Meetup on the premises of his employer E-Werk Mittelbaden, so I was happy to take him up on that offer.
I was very lucky with the organisation of the second Meetup, because Stefan Weber, who has been working at Printus for some time, offered himself and his colleague Melanie Schnetz with a technical topic. Just like in June, the two were able to share their professional experience on the topic of event streaming (with Kafka).
The second topic also appeared as if by magic. Their colleague Tobias Lehmann, also from Printus, had the perfect follow-up topic to Sven’s soft skills topic from June. He is an agile Coach as well, was able to tell us what makes people flourish and explained among other things the PERMA model of positive psychology according to Martin Seligmann.
Conclusion»
Overall, I was very satisfied and enthusiastic about both Meetups. I think the mixture of a technical and a psychological topic was well received, not only by me but also by the participants. A really great mix and if one topic is perhaps not a 100% match for someone, they can still take away something enriching by the other.
I am motivated to continue the series with further meetups in 2024, but I still have respect for the challenges of organising, find a room/sponsor, one or two interesting topics and participants.
Did I mention that there are now stickers for the Meetup? ;)