DevOps Girls 2021 in Review
Remember when we were enthusiastically learning how to make our own bread and had the energy for social Zoom dinners with friends after spending all day on Zoom for work? Well, that’s not 2021 for DevOps Girls. Things slowed down, but not completely stopped. Here’s our wrap up of the year (the less exciting version of your Spotify wrapped).
Let’s take a look at some data. Our Slack numbers increased, but only by 20 or so. Our Twitter account saw a decent jump of about 200 followers. Pretty good for a fairly quiet account. We now have 1,597 Twitter followers. Our MeetUp grew by 21 people, which is very small jump compared to last year.
These numbers are smaller than previous years. These numbers show there’s still new people seeking us out and people keen to join our community. It also shows that 2021 was a very quiet year for engagement and this is very expected.
Workshops
Against the odds, we still managed to deliver multiple workshops for our community. For some of us, the opportunity to deliver and attend these workshops was an opportunity to connect with a community we felt so disconnected from.
In May we delivered two Terraform beginner workshops. This was with the support of SEEKers Bridget, Lee, Leo and Co-Organiser Franca. These were shorter workshops with lots of hands-on content. We ran our first ‘during-business-hours’ workshop as a trial. Normally our events happen evening or weekends. These were great small engaged groups. It was also great to add a new topic to our repo of workshops.
Co-Organiser JC ran our Kubernetes 101 workshop in September. This was run using Discord and was a small and engaged group. This event also raised money for Sikh Volunteers who do excellent work providing meals as COVID crisis support.
Fresh Blood
With Franca momentarily stepping away from DevOps Girls to become a first-time mother, it was time to seek out some fresh faces who’d like to contribute to our community. Franca put out the call within the SEEK Women in Technology community and Ash and Nancy put their hands up to create and run an event.
Being an event organiser introduces you to so many new skills and opportunities. It’s also a great way to reinforce your knowledge on a topic you’re interested in. We are really grateful to have them join our group of organisers and can’t wait to see what they do for DevOps Girls moving forward.
For the remainder of a very busy 2021, Nancy and Ash did user research, topic research, content creation, content testing and user group testing to bring us our first event of 2022!
Our Community
Thanks to the user research done by Nancy and Ash, we also got some insights about what our community are looking for from DevOps Girls. Here’s what we learnt.
The trend that hasn’t changed, is that people just want experience with different/new technologies — as opposed to career development or ‘soft skills’. As technologists, this is no surprise. We are constantly being draw to new tools and ways of doing things.
Out of the technologies we asked people about, the top three that people would like to learn were graphql, cloud computing and python. People are looking to up-skill themselves as their main motivator.
We asked the community what restricts them from achieving their learning goals. It was clear from people’s responses that lack of time was the biggest factor. When you think about what has affected us during 2021, lack of time is no surprise. There are reports that we’re working longer hours when we’re working from home. Also, parents took on the additional work of homeschooling, which put a lot more pressure on our ability to make time for learning and career development.
Looking Forward
So, what does DevOps Girls look like in 2022? We will continue to deliver great technical content for our community to continue to grow their technical skills. Things we can’t be sure of is how we deliver these opportunities. Its too soon to plan for any in-person events and I can’t imagine we will ever get rid of virtual events. They have the benefit of being accessible and can be attended by people outside of our Melbourne hub. The way we work has been changed forever and this means DevOps Girls also needs to evolve as well.
The DevOps Girls organisers look forward to meeting and discussing what’s next for our awesome community and how we can continue to improve our industry for women in technology.
