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Meetups in Germany

Earlier this month I spent several days in Germany. I made some time to do some tourist stuff, but I was actually there for work. I visited and worked from the Mesosphere office for a couple days and host a Meetup. I also made my way over to Berlin for a day to host a Meetup. Throughout my journey I was able to enjoy good German food and sights, and meet lots of friendly people!

The Mesosphere office itself is on the top floor of an office building, at the 7th floor that makes it a reasonably tall building for the city so there are some nice views of the surrounding area.

But Meetups! The first Meetup of the week was over in Berlin. The topic of both the Meetups was “MesosCon Recap” which consisted of me presenting a short slide deck (slides for Berlin) that gave an overview of what MesosCon was, some of the key themes, and what came of events like the new Town Hall on DC/OS. After my introduction, for each location we invited speakers who were local to that region of Germany so we had a different line-up for each evening. Each speaker was given a half hour slot to give a shortened version of a MesosCon EU talk. It was a new format for me, but it was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed bringing a piece of MesosCon to folks who couldn’t make it out to Prague.

The speaker lineup in Berlin consisted of:

  • Till Rohrmann of Data Artisans on “Apache Flink Meets Apache Mesos and DC/OS” (slides)
  • Kevin Klues of Mesosphere on “Running Distributed TensorFlow on DC/OS” (slides)
  • Tim Nolet from magnetic.io on “How to extend Marathon-LB with Canary releasing features using Vamp” (slides)

Huge thanks to all of them for coming out, both Kevin and Tim gave great talks at MesosCon EU, and it was great to have Till join us to present using a slide deck that was not his own, but as a leader in the subject matter he did a fabulous job.

The staff at betahaus, the venue, were also incredibly helpful. They got us all sorted with the projector, pizza delivery and with drinks throughout the evening.

Thursday night I was joined by my colleague Matt Jarvis for the Meetup in Hamburg! At this one Matt and I ran through the introduction slide deck and made some adjustments (slides for Hamburg). This introduction was longer than the one I did in Berlin, partially because the speaker lineup was shorter, and because I had the help of Matt who took time to flesh out some of the impressive statistics about cluster and workload sizes from the keynotes, and he could cover the tracks he was track lead on, so it wasn’t just my perspective from the operations tracks.

Following our introduction, we were joined by our pair of MesosCon EU speakers from Mesosphere for slightly shortened renditions of their talks:

  • Johannes Unterstein on “Marathon and Jobs – Today and Tomorrow” (slides)
  • Adam Bordelon on “Mesos Security Exposed!” (slides)

Logistics were a bit easier since this Meetup was held at the Mesosphere office. They tell me that we don’t normally have a skeleton joining us in the large meeting space, but it was just after Halloween so the decorations were lingering. It was a fun night and the crowd was a bit bigger than the one we had in Berlin, but I admit that I skipped having Meetup pizza for a second night in a row and instead joined Matt for a later dinner at the restaurant in our hotel.