Kickstarting Sentry Meetups with Community Show-and-Tell Night
As an open-source company, Sentry believes in contributing to the developer community both online and in person. So in January 2018, we launched our Sentry Scouts meetups (thanks to our first developer advocate Chloe Condon)! The DevRelCon award-winning series featured panel discussions on a new tech topic every month: open source, DevOps, UX, and more. (You may also remember the s'mores, hot chocolate, and giant inflatable camp-themed decorations!)
We're growing our developer relations team, starting with... well, me! I'm Liz Krane, our new Developer Avocado — er, I mean Developer Advocate! I'm excited to build upon the Sentry Scouts community, expanding our meetup repertoire to include new event formats.
So what's the new meetup all about? I'm so glad you asked!
Introducing...
✨Community show-and-tell night ✨
Join us on Wednesday, July 31st to kick off our new event series with a lightning round of show-and-tells!
We look forward to hearing your best fails and what you've learned from them! Tell us about AI gone awry, strange side effects, that time you (or not you — it would never be you) took down the production server, or any of your funniest face-palm moments as a developer — and the lessons these misadventures uncovered.
We invite every developer (yes, you!) to submit an informal 5-minute story showing off your best fails, foibles, and fiascos.
Why only 5 minutes per story?
To encourage every developer to share their experience in a casual, fun environment. (Everybody has a story to share!)
To explore diverse topics from a diverse group of speakers. (Get a taste of something new in our potluck-style buffet of ideas!)
To invite those new to public speaking to make their voices heard. (We're super low-key and judgment-free!)
Humble origins of the show-and-tell format
Look at all these happy people at a Learn Teach Code meetup (who are smiling of their own free will and definitely were not bribed)!
Before joining Sentry, I founded (and still run) Learn Teach Code, the second-largest tech meetup in Southern California with over 9,300 members. The goal: empower both aspiring and professional developers to lead their own local events, building stronger and more diverse tech communities — especially in lower-income neighborhoods where tech meetups are few and far between.
Learn Teach Code's show-and-tell lightning talk events were some of our most successful meetups, especially the edition hosted at the WordCamp LA 2018 conference, which featured a diverse group of many first-time speakers who shared projects on everything from webVR to geospatial data engineering to CSS animation.
So now that I'm at Sentry and living in the land of tech startups and La Croix, I'm excited to expand Sentry Meetups San Francisco to feature projects, stories, and lessons from our San Francisco community members!
Speaking of which, we'd love your feedback — if you have suggestions for future Sentry meetups, contact on Twitter at @getsentry. Otherwise, I hope to see you on Wednesday, July 31st!
