Location, Signage, Food

Just like it says on the tin, it was brunch at the Garden Court hotel, which is near the Palo Alto train station. There was no signage at the venue on the ground floor, but the staff knew about the event and pointed me up the fancy stairs and to the left, from which vantage one can see the big Facebook banner, with two young ladies attending the sign-in table. I was asked for my first name, but for no other information. I filled out and wore one of those sticky my-name-is badges.

The event was not full; there were room for twice as many people, at a squeeze. Attendees filled three round tables, with a little spillover- so about 25 people in total. The food was ok- standard hotel fare of fresh fruit, eggs, bacon, sausage, potatoes, orange juice, grapefruit juice. The tables were set with tablecloths, water glasses, silverware, and coffee decanters. There was a side table with champagne and other chilled bottled beverages.

There was no pitch/sell (that I noticed, having arrived a little late at 11:20)- just a “Hello all! Pardon for interrupting your conversations briefly. Welcome! Facebook is happy to host. We hope that you enjoy talking to each other.”

At around 1:20 the hosts from the table outside came in to say that they had only had the room until 1pm, and we were all great people and please continue your conversations outside.

Links

Outcomes

  • One attendee requested a slack room for the group; organizers said “what about a facebook group? We have a facebook group!” and the request for a slack channel was reiterated.
  • This was the most interesting event of its type that I remember attending. Usually I am not a fan of the “attendees as content” format, but this worked well. Conversations generally didn’t lag, although we had some points of disagreement. Notable topics included H1B visas and their effect on the ecosystem, hair dying, forks of nagios, tools used instead of nagios, how to explain the value of not having outages to management, various bemoaning stories about previous places of employment, thoughts about how to judge the technical shit-together-ness of a tech team that one is considering joining, strategies for ameliorating long commutes, servers not being in UTC, metrics and measurement, geofencing applications…
  • Most of the attendees seemed very senior in their careers, while still being mostly or wholly technical, or only managerial at a technical level.

Recommendations

  • I was going to try to say ‘Seed’ the tables with people so that the next person who comes in won’t try to crunch in at the last seat at a table, and then there will be a period where someone- inevitably a latecomer- will be the only one at the next growing table, but actually I think that a lot of the value of the event comes from having a full 7 or 8 people in the group, so maybe not. It would be a nice add to have some kind of actively performed greeter/facilitator role tho.
  • Some signage downstairs for noobs, plz.
  • The aforementioned slack channel, or other thing that is not on facebook. Reading facebook for technical things is weird to me and makes it hard to partition work and distractions mentally for me.
  • Advertise / invite a little more vigorously, in order to take adcantage of all the space in your venue. I find it difficult to believe that more people would not be very interested in this event. …Or I may be overestimating how many people are A) in the physical area B) in Ops, or at least Ops-ish C) Feel like going to a brunch
  • Provide more description of the event on the invite!
  • Lightning talks maybe?

Notes

  • OCP white-box switching
  • I suggested geofencing as a solution to a problem, and after some research, rediscovered Llama which I used to use.
  • Left-handed cameras are not currently in production. (although left-handed apps for cell phones do exist) They used to be made, but are not currently made.
  • My rating of this event is (*walk). It was ok. I had fun. It was of value but not of notably high value for me. It fit in well with my other plans.
  • Siemens hosts a women in tech conference in Boston and one of the attendees is going to go … maybe it is this one?

People

  • Two independent consultants, one of whom is at a place I used to work
  • Presenter at 2014 who commented on my shirt
  • Junior person on an H1B visa
  • FB ops person
  • Manager / DBA of a team at some big company
  • Many other cool people