My first ever tech meetup

Meetups are a great way to network and upskill. Software engineer Daniel Wilkinson lifts the lid on what to expect as he talks about his first meetup, DevOps North East, hosted by BGL Tech from its Sunderland tech hub

Meetups in the tech world are wildly popular. You can probably find an event in every city across the UK. Attending at least one meetup a quarter is pretty much an essential requirement of any developer and I was looking forward to attending my first, DevOps North East (DONE) at at BGL’s Sunderland tech hub.

I’d been told they were a great place to learn and to network with others in the community in a relaxed environment and find out what’s new on the scene. And, as I work for BGL Tech in Sunderland, I didn’t have far to travel to my first meetup, unlike some of the other 42 attendees who travelled up to 30 miles to be there.

Doors opened at 6pm. Pizza was ordered. We gave ample time for people to arrive and network before we began the first talk at 6.30pm. People were scattered around the office chatting away. It was a great opportunity to represent the BGL brand in the DevOps community. It was also a great opportunity for us to learn as a business and give due consideration to solutions which other DevOps developers have implemented.

By the time the first talk was over pizza had arrived and we gathered like animals at the watering hole. It was a great opportunity to discuss the previous talk while indulging in some delicious pizza. It was interesting to talk to people and hear of their experience or trials with the technology.

Josh Yaxley, a .NET developer based at BGL’s Sunderland tech hub, was up
next and presented Infrastructure as Code: Diving into the AWS Cloud Development kit. This technology was recently released in July of 2019. It was a very timely talk. Josh walked us through some infrastructure as code using well-known programming languages. We then dived into AWS CDK looking at use cases such as API’s, setting up pipelines and load balancing. It was a useful talk that sparked a curiosity to want to learn more.

After the second talk we shared a moment to thank our speakers, sponsor and host. We then networked for a final time before going our separate ways.

So I’m pleased to tell you I really enjoyed it. It was great to meet people,
at the same grade as me, who also work in tech in the North East. I could come away from the talks knowing how to implement the technologies as there were real life examples. I also enjoyed being there from the start and seeing how it was all set up. And it’s great that at BGL personal and professional development is strongly encouraged and supported.

We took away some constructive feedback that we can work on and we can’t wait to host another event here in the Sunderland tech hub.

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