Since starting at Elastic last November, one of the things that Leslie and I have been wanting to do is start a Developer Hangout series. You know, one of those things where you can watch or participate in a live chat, with an actual human, in a setting that is less formal and more fun, but still gives you actual useful information. Now that we’ve grown our team to include amazing folks like Shaunak, Valentina, and Michelle, we’ve had time to actually launch this thing, along with our new Developer Newsletter — and I’m delighted to share that our FIRST EVER hangout will be TODAY, June 12, at 11:00am PDT. (That’s 18:00 UTC, 14:00 EDT, 20:00 CEST, for non-Pacific-time zone folks.)
Here’s the details on how you can join us today:
- We’ll be streaming live on YouTube at the aforementioned time.
- Follow along, and ask questions on IRC! We’ll be in #elastic-webinar on Freenode.
So what will we generally doing in our Hangouts? The format is pretty simple: Our sparkling-personality host (that’s me, this week!) will be joined by one of Elastic‘s awesome developers, who will be giving a short 15-20m presentation about something Amazing and Enlightening. And the rest of the Hangout depends on you, my friends: It’s an AMA format (that’s “ask me anything”, not American Medical Association, American Motorcyclist Association, or otherwise), which means that if you have questions on anything (within the normal bounds of politeness, that is!) for our guest star, you can ask them on IRC and we’ll queue them up to be answered. Our goals here are to be informative, and authentic, and not stuffy or sales-y.
My guest this week, Aaron Mildenstein, is one of Elastic’s developers for the Logstash project, and he’ll be sharing his story of how his involvement in open source, specifically Logstash, landed him a job doing open source work for a living on the project he loves. Now, of course, this very much mirrors my own story — volunteering in the Fedora Project on the Marketing team eventually turned into being employed by Red Hat to work on Fedora full-time — so it’s a subject near and dear to my heart. I got a sneak peek a few days ago of his presentation and he has some great perspectives that I had never thought about before, so I’m hoping that many of our viewers out there will learn a new thing or two (or twenty)! We’ll probably also wind up chatting a bit about Logstash and Curator — so there will be plenty of opportunities to learn new stuff. And of course, if you can’t make it, we’ll be sure to share how to watch it later.
Our future hangouts will be announced each week in the aforementioned Developer Newsletter — and will be exclusively for subscribers only, so you should DEFINITELY sign up. It’s easy to consume, with lots of pointers to information with brief descriptions, so you can quickly find the information that’s useful to you. (We were inspired by some of our favorite newsletters that do the same — including Gareth Rushgrove‘s DevOps Weekly, Matt Jaynes’ Briefs on Ansible, Docker’s Weekly Newsletter, which you should also totally subscribe to.) We’ll be bringing you the latest and greatest on all things ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) on a weekly basis!
In conclusion: I hope to see many of you today on IRC for our first hangout, and that you’ll watch along live — I’m a bit nervous, but totally excited to have a great topic for our first Hangout and to be finally officially launching this series. We’re really hoping to have some great questions, so, HINT, HINT, you should join us on IRC to ask those questions in #elastic-webinar as you follow along on YouTube. It’s a topic that both Aaron and I are super passionate about, and one that I know to be able to inspire great questions from many of my friends in the open-source universe. So be there! (We love moral support too. And feedback afterwards! If nothing else, you can watch as I try really hard to not accidentally drop foul language and enjoy that. :D)
robyn's bikeshed for yakshaving 