As a long-time visitor of the DevOps Frankfurt meetup, I always had the desire for establishing the same kind of event here in my beautiful town of Würzburg. Together with Andreas Rudat (mayflower) and Sebastian Kremer (Eikona), we finally made it happen with our first event of DevOps Würzburg Mainfranken.

The diversity between the in total 40 participants lead to very broad discussions, with a lot of thoughts focused on DevOps culture and why we need it. Participants ranged from roughly a third of them being students (some even in their first semester) to CEO, from many in the role of developer, over sysadmins to project managers and Technical Evangelist.

To get people familiar with the ideas and thinking of the DevOps movement and to make them clear that this is not a set of tooling that solves one’s day-to-day problems immediately, we prepared two introductory talks.

• Lorenz Weber (mayflower) talked about the questions that DevOps answers and the new ones that appear out of that - and if there is this kind of a “DevOp”.
• I myself gave an introduction to the concept of Continuous Delivery, which is strongly interwoven with Agile development and builds opon the DevOps thinking to deliver software faster and better.

To summarize this evening, I was very happy to see that many participants - given the size of our “village” and compared to my experience with other meetups. Probably, the location in the computer science building at the University of Würzburg motivated more students, is easy to reach, and also a “neutral” place.

The only aspect that is disappointing to me is that not a single one of the other (~80) PhD candidates and researchers here in the computer science faculty joined us. This reminds me once more about my feelings that I am wrong in academia and have to get out here ASAP (luckily, this will really happen very soon).

As the spirit of the participants definitely motivated us to continue with this meetup series, we already agreed on the next talk being once again focused on cultural aspects. Sebastian Klenk, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, will talk about the experience and transformations happening in his organization. The date will be announced soon via the meetup group.

Finally, I want to thank my friend Andy Grunwald for sharing his lessens learned from running the Web Engineering Meetup Düsseldorf (former PHP User Group) which helped me and us to prepare this event.