CockroachDB, giving back and building community

Last month at DevWeek 2022 here in Austin I talked to a ton of cool vendors.  One such vendor was CockroachDB and who should I run into at the booth but Lisa-Marie Namphy!  Lisa-Marie, who heads their Developer Relations team, is passionate about CockroachDB's contribution to the broader community and was dying to tell me all about it.  Take a listen to how they support efforts like Black Girls CODE to show their appreciation and to build community. 

Transcript

Lisa-Marie Namphy, CockroachDB  

[00:00:00] Barton: All right, we're here at Dev Wheat Cloud. I'm here with Lisa Marie Namphy. How are you doing?

[00:00:04] Lisa-Marie Namphy: I am great. It's so nice to see you again, Barton. We go way back

[00:00:07] Barton: I know the pleasure's mine. So you're now at Cockroach, you're head of Dev Rel, can you tell me what kind of charitable stuff you do? You were saying that you were doing a bunch in that area

[00:00:17] Lisa-Marie Namphy: Yeah, it's super important to us. Every show we always wanna make sure we give back to the community, hopefully the local community as well as charities like Black Girls Code, Women who code. UNICEF in support of Ukraine at the moment. The Cancer Research Institute and memory of Dan Cohen, the former head of the CNCF.   So we always wanna be giving back. So what we're doing at this show is if we scan your badge, we're gonna give $3 to a charity that you get to choose. And we have these stickers that you get to put on our lovable cockroach here

[00:00:45] Barton:. Let's show it. Wow.

[00:00:46] Lisa-Marie Namphy: Yeah. We did this Kubecon with a lightboard and we had buttons that you could put in for the charity you choose, but it's just one of our ways of giving back and it's a very popular way to show our appreciation and to build community.  We've been doing this at shows for almost two years and people seem to really appreciate it

[00:01:04] Barton: Which was the first charity that you started with?

[00:01:07] Lisa-Marie Namphy: Black Girls Code. And I think, yeah our events manager at the time, the wonderful JP Sisneros. I think he started it at AWS Reinvent and we had a big sign and he would be standing out there and people were just coming to the sign saying, I do want to give to Black Girls Code. And we got a lot of badge scans from it, so it's a nice way to give back.

[00:01:27] Barton: Awesome. Lisa-Marie Namphy. Thanks so much.