Running a Katacoda workshop at your community meetup! | Katacoda Blog

Over the last couple of months, Katacoda has been teaming up with members of the DevOps community to try freshening up the way software developers interact and learn about new technologies within the Cloud Native space. You can read about our collaboration with Cloud Native Wales and Contino.

We want to expand our support and partner up with community meetups to help them deliver hands-on, interactive based meetups on Cloud Native technologies.

We believe there should be a platform where software developers from all different backgrounds and experiences can come together to learn and explore what is new within the space. With different technologies coming on the market what better way to upskill and strengthen the community than real hands-on scenarios that solve real problems?

Katacoda was born with the idea to remove that barrier to new technologies and skills through live interactive demos and training environment. We have created over 150 free interactive scenarios, (yes you saw correctly) that will help solve real problems and learn those skills that are in high demand. Combining your meetup with a community workshop will allow software developers to leave the stress of their daily work and be in an environment where there are no distractions but still have the right tools to do so.

This will generate more interactions in your meetups as you will be able to invite attendees to participate with you as you go along and at home where they can practice at their convenience.

For every event Katacoda will provide:

• Pre-built scenarios/demos hosted to run smoothly within the workshop.
• A custom URL and dedicated resources to ensure the service is available to everyone attending.

Sound good? With everything taken care of, you can focus on your community and keeping the software developer fuelled with enough food and drinks to get through the exercises (I hear pizza is a local favourite!). Katacoda will cover the costs of the infrastructure, provide all the learning materials, interactive labs and work with you to host a fantastic meetup event for your group.

For this new style of meetup we have put together a bit of a guideline to make sure the event runs smoothly.

1. Attendees arrive and register
2. There will then be Pizza and Beer available for everyone to mingle and refuel.
3. The attendees will be introduced to Katacoda and will be provided with the customised page for the Meetup.
4. Session will begin and Attendees will go through and complete the exercises. As an organiser you will have the opportunity to pair with people to provide assistance.
5. Everyone gains new experience and can leave confident of the next steps on their learning progress.

If you have any ideas that would work well then we'd love to hear your thoughts. If you are interested in running a Katacoda Workshop at your next meetup please fill out this form and we will get back to you with the next steps.

Katacoda considers a "Community Meetup" to be a meetup that is free for everyone to attend, hosted on Meetup.com with a public and valid code of conduct.