Devs Just Wanna Have Fun (and also to Code): Our First Sentry Scouts Meetup

Editor’s note: This is a recap of our recent January Sentry Scout’s event at our offices in San Francisco from our Developer Evangelist, Chloe Condon. If you’re interested in attending our next event, it’s coming up on February 21st and the topic is DevOps.

This title of this post has been my personal mantra while planning our monthly Sentry Scouts meetup. I’ve been working in tech for most of my adult life, and I’ve spent time at my fair share of both stellar and not-so-stellar meetups, product announcements, and conferences.

Meet-ups in general are like burrito places in SF: there’s a lot of them, but only some of them are memorable, good, and have the sort of quality salsa that makes them worth a return visit.

Here at Sentry we’ve set out to create the sort of meet up you’ll look forward to taking part in each month. You likely saw our super campy (pun intended) video showcasing this, but in case you didn’t, you can take a peek here 🏕. Ultimately we’ve made a promise to never pitch you, feed you cold pizza or warm beer, make you bored, or (despite our meetup name) force you to sell girl scout cookies.

You’ll be happy to learn that we kept these promises at our inaugural January meet-up!

What was the evening like? Allow me to paint you a picture. And also to show you some actual pictures.

We started off chatting over s’more fondue (that’s s’mores, not “some more” fondue), hot chocolate, gummi snacks, and sliders. We had a great time welcoming our new scouts, and loved sharing war stories, pro-tips, and anecdotes about open source.

This was followed by Powerpoint Karaoke. Scout Leader Richard, put together a lovely selection of quality clipart and stock photos for our COO Bill to (hilariously) improvise to for five minutes. We then opened the floor to a brave volunteer, and Kristen Loyd from Holberton School had us rolling in the aisles. Seriously. It’s amazing what a little comedy can do for a powerpoint presentation.

After a quick talk on open source from our CEO David Cramer (not sure if you’ve heard, but Sentry is and has always been open source), we then had an in-depth panel discussion with Nathan LeClaire of Honeycomb.io, Scott Chacon of Chatterbug (he’s also the co-founder of GitHub), Franziska von der Goltz of Bouyant, Josh Dzielak of Algolia, Ali Finkelstein of Stellar, and Zac Sweers from Uber.

It was fabulous hearing about our panel’s successes, failures, and tips around managing and contributing to open source projects.

We also enjoyed all the tweets, posts, and pictures that have been shared with the #SentryScouts hashtag. Like this one:

#SentryScouts panel/audience:
* Advertise on social media or events eg #hacktoberfest
* Write specific requirements on ticket to avoid PR review headache
* Express gratitude! Use templates or substantial rewards
* Label tickets "Icebox" or "first timer"

— Andy Tuba (@andytuba) January 18, 2018

And this one:

“Almost everything you’re doing, it’s already started from somewhere that you can improve” @getsentry #oss #sentryscouts #opensource

— Kimberly Wong (@kjowong) January 18, 2018

And this one:

.@dzello on the noise outside at the @getsentry Meetup. “Garbage collection in San Francisco isn’t just about the JVM.” #sentryscouts pic.twitter.com/2708oelmlm

— justin @ Dev Week (@elof) January 18, 2018

Based on the success of our first meet-up, I’d say that my hypothesis was proven correct: Devs just want to have fun (while also spending some time coding). Feed us some good snacks, give us a solid topic, invite some interesting speakers, entertain us with some light comedy, don’t go on for too long, and we’ll stay so late that the office team will start flipping the lights off and on an hour after the event officially ended to convince people it’s time to leave.

Regret missing out on our inaugural event? Never fear- it’s monthly! Join our Sentry Scouts Meetup group to stay in the know about our upcoming topics, speakers, and other special surprises. Our February event is on 2/21 and the theme is DevOps! You can look forward to Girl Scout Cookies (as promised, you won’t be selling them; we’ll be serving them, and you also be able to purchase boxes from a real-life Girl Scout), a performance by the hilarious Becca Rosenthol (an engineer who also writes incredible songs), and our usual PowerPoint karaoke and awesome panel of speakers.

See you later this month!