[Pulp-dev] DevConf.cz '18 Event Summary

Thu Feb 1 20:31:13 UTC 2018

Thanks to Brian, Dennis, Tanya, Ina, and Milan for all of their hard
work in preparing talks, workshops, booth staffing and new swag.  I
was very pleased with Pulp presence at devconf.

I'll share some thoughts as well.

Booth & Demos
* Even though we received feedback that a demo at the booth would have
been nice, with the booth placement in the corner and the folks that
came by, I think driving folks to come to the workshop and not
monopolizing our small booth front real estate was the right choice.
* Brand guide descriptions were great and very helpful.
* As a manager, experiencing the feedback loop of booth visitors was
extremely valuable

Swag
* AWESOME! You know you want the new shirt and stickers!
* Banner was a great addition to the booth presence!

Pulp3 Plugin Planning Workshop
* Attendee numbers on the first workshop slot of the day on the last
day of devconf was really good. It was much slower on Sunday, and the
hallways were noticeably less populated prior to the workshop
starting.
* Attendees were very engaged and active. Lots of interactive
questions and discussion/attendee participation.
* Flow of presentation and materials was very good. Lots of the
questions were addressed later on, which I think reflects that the
order of the information and build up of materials was spot on.

-Robin

On Tue, Jan 30, 2018 at 8:56 AM, Brian Bouterse <bbouters at redhat.com> wrote:
> This past weekend several Pulp core devs attended DevConf.cz in Brno, Czech
> Republic. Here is a summary of the activities we participated in there. Any
> feedback, questions, or discussion is welcome.
>
> Booth & Demos
> --------------------
>
> Pulp had a booth setup on both Friday and Saturday. Overall the messaging
> was designed to gain new users, updated existing users on the Pulp3 progress
> and changes, and drive traffic to the plugin writer's workshop, which was on
> Sunday. It was a 2-table booth shared with Foreman, so each project had
> their own table. Pics are here [0].
>
> We had 6 people helping with the booth, and everyone worked hard to share
> the load. A big thanks to @tterehsc, @pulpmilan, @rchan, @ipanova, and
> @dkliban. It really does take a number like 6 people to staff the booth and
> not totally wear everyone out.
>
> The banner gave the booth a very polished, professional looks. Thanks
> @ipanova!
>
> We did not run the booth on Sunday, with the observation that last year we
> did not get much traffic and almost no "new" traffic to the booth. Not
> setting it up on Sunday I think was the right decision.
>
> We had a screen setup showing a slide with the 50 word version of the Brand
> Guide [1]. This was something I saw OSAS do at their booths, and it worked
> well for us. It's great to not have to explain the most basic things about
> Pulp over and over, but instead spend the energy answering questions or
> understanding what the user's needs are.
>
> We did not have a demo at the booth at first, and several people wanted to
> "see" something, so we started demo-ing Pulp3 about half-way through. Next
> time I'll want to have a demo ready on the same machine showing the branding
> slides that we can switch back-and-forth between.
>
> We had a corner spot, which makes it practically difficult for people to
> even talk to us. That didn't prevent us from going out and talking to them,
> but next year we should really try to get a different spot.
>
> I'm really glad @rchan was able to be there too. A manager has never joined
> us at a booth before, and I can see now that it provides a unique
> opportunity to  see/meet/listen to Pulp users. Especially, those users who
> are outside of Red Hat.
>
> Take these numbers with a grain of salt. Overall I would say 30% of the
> people we talked do already knew about or used Pulp. Roughly 10% of those
> who did not use Pulp were using an alternative like Artifactory or Nexus.
> Roughly 20% of the folks we talked to self-identified as QE, which makes
> sense after QECamp. A few folks wanted several shirts for their team because
> they are in-progress of deploying Pulp at their org. :) I think it's
> probably 85% - 90% Red Hatters.
>
> Swag
> -------
>
> People love the new tshirts (thanks @ipanova!). We kind of quickly ran out
> of M and L shirts, so we probably will order a bit more of those sizes next
> time.
>
> Pulp3 Plugin Planning Workshop
> -----------------------------------------
>
> @dkliban and I delivered a planning workshop which delivered slide versions
> of this content [2]. There were 11 people who attended, but if you remove
> co-workers, managers, and just leave people I don't know, we had 5. That's
> actually pretty great considering those are 5 potential plugin contributors.
>
> The goal was to facilitate attendees writing a plan that outlines the
> requirements for a specific content type with the thinking they would take
> that plan and implement it from our docs. We invited users to post these
> plans into the wiki to get the info into the open. Here are the posted plans
> that were made: Maven [3], NuGet [4], and Helm [5].
>
> We received a lot of feedback, which I'll try to recap here to feed into
> revisions of this type of workshop:
>
> * set better expectations: It wasn't clear that this was a planning
> workshop. When you expect coding and instead get planning, that is
> unexpected.
>
> * Identify the audience better: This was for developers, but that wasn't
> entirely clear. We didn't talk much about Pulp3 specifically because it was
> planning focused, but the title suggested it would tell you a lot about
> Pulp3. This expectation mismatch is something we could have been more clear
> about up front.
>
> * provide an architectural introduction to what a plugin needs to do. We did
> not provide enough context before starting into the "ok now your plugin
> needs to do X, Y, and Z because that is what Pulp needs". We need a great
> diagram.
>
> * show off pulp_file early on. We didn't have time to do this, but I think
> it's the code-level view people wanted to see.
>
> * It needs to be at least two sessions. One session on planning like we did,
> and a followup session to outline how to actually write code to do that with
> the plugin API. It was suggested there be a night in between these to allow
> for digestion of information on day 1.
>
> * We would have benefited from more time. 2 hours was enough to go over the
> planning, but really nothing else.
>
> * We need to think more about the approach: "Is this workshop focused on
> learning to be applied later, or is it a chance to start working on a new
> plugin now?" Put another way, is this workshop for me to learn how to write
> a plugin by recreating a simple plugin that already exists, or is it a time
> to start on something that has never been written?
>
> Several ideas were generated that I want to recap/share:
>
> * An alternate format. Instead of having users each plan their own content
> type, have all users make a plugin that is simple and well-understood (cat
> photos) instead of encouraging users to charge into the unknown and actually
> plan a real content type.
>
> * Youtube series: Offer all of the content ^ as a multi-part youtube series,
> with each session being pretty short ( < 15 minutes ). This would become a
> self-paced course that plugin writers could go through on their own.
>
> * Office hours: have some synchronous time for on-line collaboration between
> collaborators and core devs
>
> Interesting Talks
> ---------------------
>
> With 2 presentations and booth duty, I didn't get much chance to attend.
>
> [0]: https://photos.app.goo.gl/XEcamQoCj0GsC2Bj1
> [1]: https://pulp.plan.io/projects/pulp/wiki/Brand_guide
> [2]:
> https://docs.pulpproject.org/en/3.0/nightly/plugins/plugin-writer/planning-guide.html
> [3]: https://pulp.plan.io/projects/pulp/wiki/Maven_Plugin
> [4]: https://pulp.plan.io/projects/pulp/wiki/NuGet_Packages
> [5]: https://pulp.plan.io/projects/pulp/wiki/Helm_Support
>
> -Brian
>
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