Meetups are a great way to share cloud knowledge

The meetup phenomenon is one that spans domains, industries and geographies.
Take a quick moment to browse meetup.com for a local gathering, and you’ll find topics as diverse as “knitting for beginners” and “artificial Intelligence and machine learning.” Browse meetups in other cities, and you’ll see a similarly broad range of topics, driven out of interest and an appetite to learn.
Meetup.com defines a meetup group as follows: “A Meetup group is a local community of people. Meetup groups are sustained through Meetup events, which are face-to-face gatherings that happen in real life between members and organizers.”
Often, I describe the Bluemix meetup I host in Dublin as an informal gathering that provides a platform for learning new things and sharing expertise. I like to learn from those that attend how they’re using the Bluemix platform, and, in return, I schedule Bluemix experts to deliver enlightening, insightful talks on Bluemix capabilities and services.
Given the informal nature of a meetup, the audience can be quite varied, which makes for an even more interesting gathering. Typically in Dublin, we see a mix of developers from startup organizations, enterprise application developers, students and people who are learning to code as a hobby.
I’ve found that certain topics resonate better than others. Often it’s the meetups focused on Watson or DevOps that draw the bigger crowds. For example, one of the winning teams from a local Internet of Things (IoT) hackathon presented at the last Dublin Bluemix meetup on the topic of “using AI, IoT and Watson Machine Learning.” The initial hackathon was held in The Portershed in Galway, Ireland.
The winning team that spoke at our Bluemix meetup in Dublin built a solution using Node-RED and Watson Developer Cloud services to manage hospital bed allocation. The real-world context of the solution meant the audience could readily understand the challenge, and how technology could be applied to address and surmount it. This made for a very engaging meetup.
We host this Bluemix meetup in Dublin once a month, usually on the last Tuesday or Wednesday. We’re just one of the many regular Bluemix meetups that take place worldwide.
If you’re keen to learn more, simply look for a Bluemix meetup near you on meetup.com. I can give you a head start and let you know that there are regular Bluemix meetups in Seoul, London, Toronto, Raleigh, Sao Paulo, Sydney and of course, Dublin.
If you happen to be in Ireland anytime soon, be sure to look us up.
The post Meetups are a great way to share cloud knowledge appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud