Communities

I love the software development scene. I like to participate and thrive within different platforms, tools, languages.

Nowadays it’s complicated to stay up to date in multiple fronts, so regular user group meetings and conferences are a great way to check what the rest of the world is up to. Thess can give you insight into adoption tendencies and provide you with a lot of valuable pointers and tips that would take an enormous amount of time to learn by yourself.

This meetings and conferences can act as a filter, but that can be dangerous as well. You could be blinded by trendy cool stuff that may be obsolete or abandoned a short while later, or you could get tunnel vision from reviewing the same topics again an again. A sane approach I’ve found works really well is having some variety and not limiting yourself to a single language or tool, but jumping around and getting in contact with the rest of the tech you don’t know.

They are invaluable in my opinion, and make a difference when choosing a technology over another just because the pool talent is better in your area. They represent a place to reach when you’re lost, to share successes and failures. To learn, teach and make your environment a better place.

I’ve been attending a lot of conferences in the past years, as well as user groups. A couple of local user groups that are special to me, the first one is Betabeers. It’s always been a monthly must. There’s a great variety of topics and speakers, and the attendees are top notch. I’m glad to say that I’ve made some friends thanks to Betabeers. The past months there’s been some changes and as of the past edition, I’m proud to be an organizer for Betabeers Barcelona. Here’s to keeping up the good work started by Cristian, then continued by Cayetano, Miguel angel and Alejandro.

Another special user group for me is Ansible Barcelona. If you’ve never played with provisioning tools, you’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly when using Ansible. I liked the tool so much that I asked in twitter how come we didn’t already have a local user group. Well, Ansible co-founder Said Ziouani replied to my tweet and a month later I was booting the user group in a room with 50 of the 100+ members in our meetup. The support has been amazing and we already have lined up some local speakers.

It’s been a couple of years since the first time I presented for the first time in Barcelona; I started a small user group, then moved to bigger group like Betabeers where sometimes there was 90–100 attendees. I love I much I’ve learned in the process, and how rewarding it’s been. The local community is in my opinion the perfect training ground for public speakers. The attendees are already familiar with you, so they can be more honest and upfront with their feedback. This familiarity will also make you less shy, after all, most of your friends have already presented there, so you can do it too.

The dev community in Barcelona is definitely one of the huge wins this city has to offer. I may be moving out one day, but when I do, the first thing I’ll be testing will be the dev events and community.