Last Friday, the cloudusergroup organized the Virtual Community Event #ADCD2022, the Austrian Developer Community Day 2022. We had 25+ interesting sessions with great speakers and a great virtual day of the event. Here are some impressions of it.
There hasn't been a local community event for cloud developers for a long time. So we decided to hold such an event. Martina Grom and I, Toni Pohl, started to organize the event end of 2021. Due to the current Covid situation, it was clear that the event could unfortunately only take place virtually. Thankfully we got great support from Rainer Stropek, Martin Ullrich, Christian Glessner and Zaid Zaim. and we found some sponsors for advertising and for financing the community platform Hopin we wanted to use for the first time: Thanks to Microsoft Austria, atwork, Software Architects, hololux, tietoevry and to Coding Club Linz for your support!
The idea was to hold an event with sessions for developers who (want to) use cloud technologies, according to the motto "From the community, for the community". We used the proven Sessionize platform for the Call for Papers and were overwhelmed by how many great session suggestions we received from the international community. Many thanks for that! Interestingly, mostly sessions for the cloud were submitted, and fewer sessions for developers. There are so many exciting topics and we have tried to choose the best ones. Furthermore, we were able to win some Microsoft Cloud Advocates for the event. Special thanks to Laurent Bugnion for the brand new keynote he produced for us.
At first we only wanted to do a small, local event, but it grew quickly due to the great interest and the large number of great sessions. We then started the www.cloudusergroup.at event website collecting all relevant data for participation. Shortly before the event, the idea came up to use Hopin and StreamYard as a streaming platform for the event. This resulted in more effort to merge data from the eventbrite registration system, Sessionize communication with the sessions and speakers, Hopin as the event platform and the event website and to keep it up to date. But we made it in time. Furthermore, thanks to Rainer and the Coding Club Linz for providing the Hopin platform for our event.
The result was the virtual event that took place on February 25th, see the event website at www.cloudusergroup.at. Christian and Zaid even prepared a Metaverse after-party at AltspaceVR for the event. Thanks for that (and for the AltspaceVR Guide, Zaid)!
The community day covered Development with Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365 and .NET, including a lot of Azure Services for developers, see the agenda.
We started with Laurent's keynote at 9am. After that there were more than 20 sessions on three stages. It was a premiere for us to use the new platform. Basically it was going well from our point of view, with only some small glitches. However we got some feedback that before lunch the streaming quality wasn't very good. We learned that internet bandwidth, LAN and computing power seem to be very important for this platform and setup. Also, we learned that we need more producers in the background for future virtual events. Thanks to our colleague Manuel for supporting us, the organizers, here.
At #ADCD2022, the Hopin platform reported more than 120 user registrations. At the 3 stages, the top areas by attendees were 79 users at Stage 1, 51 users at Stage 2, 56 users at Stage 3, and 40 users in the Networking area. The average time spent was 4:16 hours, and there were more than 200 comments in the chat. The peak active attendees was 54 for one session, and the total number of users went down only a little bit to 40 and 30 users after 3PM (CET). We think this is great for a virtual event that was done on such short notice.
Almost all of the speakers were kind enough to allow us to make the recording of their session public. The recordings can be found on the cloudusergroup YouTube channel and all registered participants got an email with the direct link.
Thanks to all participants of the #ADCD2022 event, to all sponsors and especially to all speakers!
Martina, Martin, and Toni
on behalf of the Austrian Developer Community Day (#ADCD2022)
www.cloudusergroup.at