At the last DevStaff Org Team meeting last week (Sep2019) I announced I’ll be taking some time out from DevStaff. Many people have been pulling me aside to ask the “Why stop?” question over the past few days, so I imagine many more will wonder. This is just a short post to prevent me from repeating myself to whomever else is wondering.
It’s been 4 years.
4 years of meetups.
4 years of building the developer community here in Heraklion, Crete.
It’s been a lot of work:
For 11/12 months each year we’ve been organizing at least one meetup per month. We’ve attracted speakers from Heraklion, from Greece, from abroad. We’ve switched at least 4 venues (we’ve been very lucky on that front). We’ve been attracting an average of 50ppl per month, to events with a marketing budget of zero (0).
Looking back, I see that we’ve helped people find new jobs, we’ve helped students get linked with companies, we’ve helped companies and other non-profits tap into the ever-harder-to-find software developer audience. We’ve helped professional developers themselves evolve: learn how to present, have their knowledge challenged, find things they didn’t know about yet, hear how workplaces look like from the inside, create their own network of acquaintances and so on. The landscape, in Heraklion, today, is certainly not the same as it was 4 years ago. I would go so far as to say we’ve helped bring that change along. We’ve certainly made mistakes along the way too. We certainly could have done more, or even do things differently. There are things I regret, but they’re very few.
I am incredibly proud to have been part of that effort and to have worked with all the other amazing volunteers who made this all happen. We always tried to keep the community open and we tried to do the same for the Org team itself. Many folks (probably… 30?) have gotten involved over the years. Others a little, others a lot. Watching volunteers come together and put their spare time into a joint goal has been tremendously inspiring!
It’s now time for some time out.
It’s time to reclaim the time I’ve been putting in. It has been A LOT! It’s taken a toll on many other things too, as DevStaff has always been pretty high on my priorities list.
I don’t know what I’ll do with this time yet… I’m curious to see if I’ll end up organizing some other new event. I’m hopeful this new-found time will go into something else entirely like learning a new language, or an instrument, or reading philosophy books, or just making up philosophy with friends…
The time feels right for me to take a step back. DevStaff has grown up and it will do just fine on its own now.
What I need now is time for reflection — to create room for inspiration.