Many of my colleagues at Netconomy are participating at local tech meet-ups every months, but these groups sometimes feel a bit like their own islands. Some time ago, Maria, Mario, Philipp and myself started to think about how we could get these rather diverse groups all under one roof in order to better get to know each other. After coming up and killing quite a few ideas with fire we thought: Why not do a simple BBQ without any rules or strings attached?! So, that’s what we set out to do.
First we wanted to get that idea reviewed so we contacted among others GrazJS, the Java User Group Graz, the Scrum User Group Graz and PyGraz as we knew some of the organisers there or were part of the orga-teams there ourselves and asked if that idea resonated with them and if they’d help us advertise it. Everyone was really excited about it and so we went ahead and started to work out the details.
As date we picked 21 August, right during the summer break, because we weren’t completely sure yet how many people we could accommodate and therefore tried to keep the numbers down without having to exclude anyone with arbitrary ticket numbers.
That worked really well! In the end, around 40-50 people came and we had an awesome afternoon with great discussions and delicious food thanks to Gasthaus Gangl that managed the catering and Mario and Betti who provided tasty and beautifully community-branded cakes and muffins!
The delicious cakes and muffins Betti and Mario prepared.
What we absolutely wanted to avoid was to make a recruiting event or something that even remotely appear like one and I hope we’ve succeeded. There was exactly one speech/announcement and that was when Philipp said hello and told everyone that the buffet was open 😊
I hope everyone had an awesome time and that we’ll be able to see more such events in Graz in the future!
Big thanks to Maria, Katrin, Betti, Mario, Philipp, and everybody else at Netconomy who made this possible and all our guests for coming!
Do you want to give me feedback about this article in private? Please send it to comments@zerokspot.com.
Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂