On May 23rd, 24th I'll be in Hamburg, Germany attending the Hamburg Hackathon organized by the Hamburg Geekettes & App Camps as a member of their jury. I've been there last year already and had a great time. The atmosphere and venue was great, and so were the people. They have great prizes too, and I must admit I'm a little jealous given the fact that as a member of the jury I'm not allowed to participate... ;)
Sadly, due to popular demand the registration is already closed. That being said, you can still apply to get added to the wait list or to be informed when their next hackathon is taking place.
On May 19th I'm going to give a 20 minute developer keynote at the ESRI UK conference in London.
GitHub is a web-based repository hosting service and with close to 9 million users and over 20 million software projects hosted on GitHub.com alone, we have a real impact on how the world builds software! In 2014, Microsoft open source’d .NET on GitHub and saw a spike in contributions shortly thereafter. ESRI is a long-time and avid GitHub user and uses it for both in-house and Open Source development. All around the world, companies rely on our products for moving software projects forward.
This talk will introduce you to GitHub, explain what makes it so special and show you how easy it is to join the community to start working on software projects.
Later this month I'm going to speak about how we run Support here at GitHub at the "Night of Support" in Vienna on the 15th of May. It's a panel discussion between Laura Gaetano (Customer Support at NTRY Ticketing), Marko Locher (Support Engineer at Codeship), me, and the crowd. The venue is sektor5, we're going to start at 6 PM.
Earlier this year, I've got invited to speak at this year's Contao Conference. It'll take place in Lueneburg, Germany from May 28th to 29th. Once more, I'm going to talk about how to provide stellar customer support. The talk will be held in German and I'll be around on both days. I've got next to none experience with Contao and it's been a while since I've had my hands on a PHP project, so this is going to be fun!
I am happy to announce that I've got invited by Sipgate to talk at LeanDUS in Duesseldorf, Germany on March 25th!
The plan is to talk a little about what it's like to work at GitHub and to look back at 2 1/2 years of working on GitHub Enterprise, both from a development and support experience. The talk will be held in German and you'll also need to grab a ticket on the LeanDus website in advance.
To my excitement, I've got invited to become a mentor and member of the jury at Hack-ing.io, a hackathon that takes place in Istanbul, Turkey at Koç University from October 31st to November 2nd. The mission is to improve the world of mobile payment, e.g. by building systems that would simplify money transfers or that would allow alternative ways to pay.
Unfortunately, due to popular demand the registration is already closed. However, feel free to follow Hack-ing.io via #hacking on Twitter from October 31st on and get in touch!
Earlier this month I was invited to the Working Draft podcast's Revision 187 by Stefan Baumgartner and Christian Schaefer to talk about what it's like to be a GitHubber. And that's what we did at great length! We've been talking about how it's like to work for a company in the US, what it's like to work in a nearly non-hierarchical environment, how GitHub has changed since I've joined in December 2012 and why I didn't start an Octocat oil painting career.
If you prefer text, look no further! Christian has also transcribed our two hour long conversation in this Gist.
On October 10th at 10 am I'll be kicking off the second day of Code Talks 2014 in Hamburg, Germany. Of course, I'll be talking about my favorite topic:
"How GitHub runs support, why support's awesome, and what can be done to make it more enjoyable".
It'll be a revised version of what I've been talking about at various conferences this Spring and will be held in German for the very first time. The venue looks pretty awesome, it's a multiplex cinema. I'll be talking in "Saal 1" which has roughly a thousand seats and a 11 meter high and 24 meter wide screen. Needless to say that I'm quite excited!
As an aside, I have two free tickets to give away and five tickets offering a 50% discount each. If you're in need of a ticket, send me an email. One ticket per person, first come, first serve and only as long as the conference's not sold out!
Update:
The two free tickets are gone. 5x 50% discount tickets are still available.
It's a bit of short notice, but tomorrow I'm going to speak about my experience from 1 1/2 years working at GitHub and what it's like to work remotely for a company abroad. The Ruby user group will gather at around 7 PM at the betahaus 2.0. You can let us know that you're coming by signing up on #rughh's website.
betahaus hamburg
Eifflerstraße 43
22769 Hamburg
I'd prefer giving the talk in German, but we'll see about that at the venue.
Next weekend, on June 7th and 8th, I'm going to be in Hamburg attending the Hamburg Hackathon together with my fellow co-workers James Dennes and Ivan Žužak. Organized by the Hamburg Geekettes and Open Tech School Hamburg as well as sponsored by a Gazillion™ companies like XING, OTTO, ThoughtWorks, Wooga or GitHub we're going to hack on anything that goes under the "For a better working life!" motto.
Unfortunately, joining the Hackathon to actually hack on things is not possible anymore - all seats taken. However, you're most welcome to join us for the presentations on Sunday, June 8th at around 2:30 PM.
