Reflections on Monktoberfest 2022

 

Monktoberfest is a perfect blend of season, community, food, and beer.

For those wondering, Monktoberfest is a day and half of talks in the northeast city of Portland, Maine. Monktoberfest takes place during the fall season and blends unique talks, craft food and beer. The talks center around the crossroads of society and technology with a bonus of some of the best conversations you can have before, after and in between those talks. If this sounds interesting, here’s my take on Monktoberfest 2022.

Talk tracks were not about technology at Monktoberfest which is the norm, but rather about thought-provoking concepts and reality. Topics ranged from the pandemic and tech, the power of saying no, burnout, to organizing communities. Therefore, I won’t dive into what each talk was about, but rather will do my best to describe some key takeaways from a select few of the talks instead. If you do want to listen to the talks, they shuold be available on Redmonks youtube channel.

The talk tracks kicked off with a presentation from Julia Ferraioli and Amanda Casari which used a nostalgic-but-appropriate song “We didn’t start the fire” by Billy Joel. The talk focused on defining open-source and continued with the impact of open-source over the years starting in the 1980’s. The talk weaved in an out about how the power of the internet and representative open-source projects such as OpenSSL can have major, wide-spread effects on an industry. Topics such as maintainer incentive, trademark issues, governance, use and control can all have lasting change (a black swan event) when it comes to how we use, perceive and trust open source. Julia and Amanda published their slides, you can check them out here. Check out slide 6, I particularly like their stance on what open source must be.

Next was a talk from Andrew Todd who works at the EPA as a Water Quality Chief. He gave us a head fake that his talk was on Acid Rock Drainage in Colorado. But his real message was a challenge to the audience to make a difference in the world outside of work Andrew spoke about an event called a “flyathlon” which is a combination of trail running, fly fishing and craft beer which is likely unlike any “-athlon” you’ve heard of. However, these events were built around community to engage people in responsible recreation, inclusivity, and giving back. Andrew mentioned these events would often culminate with a few good people around a campfire and said, “Get people around the campfire and you’d be surprised at the relationships and conversations that form”. This made me think a bit more about what “our” campfire was in various communities. For sure, Monktoberfest was its own type of proverbial campfire, and this is a question I think we can all take back to both our professional lives, how can we create a campfire for our communities? If you want to learn more about the flyathlon, check it out here.

Another talk I thoroughly enjoyed was from Amara Graham, Head of DevRel at Cumunda. Her talk focused about the power of saying no (balanced with saying yes) and some lessons learned when tackling balance in the workplace. I particularly liked a phrase she used when talking about setting priorities which was; “Everything can’t be top priority, if everything is than nothing is”. This is a powerful statement and likely something we’ve all heard in our careers, albeit, usually in the form of “this has to get done ASAP” which is just disguised guilt-driven productivity. What I took from this is that we need to be thoughtful in our priorities and goals and to make sure and avoid scenarios where we are seemingly playing a game of “who can I get to do this ASAP” with our team. Doing so will allow teams to work more collaboratively and avoid common feelings of burnout.

Jeremy Meiss, director of DevRel and Community at CircleCI tackled an interesting question in his talk “could we rebuild civilization from scratch?”. The talk centered around concepts of information sharing, mentorship, apprenticeship, and coaching. Jeremy worked to engage a series of thought leaders around mentorship from the Twitter community and summarized a set of best practices that were shared including:

• Saying “I don't know” is OK
• Being a lifelong learner is key
• Coaching and Mentoring are different
• Make yourself available
• We don't always need to mentor from older to younger, we can learn from younger generations which is equally as important.

Another interesting talk was by Rachel Stephens from Redmonk who not only helps with the event but spoke this year on introspection gaps. Rachel’s talk had me genuinely laughing out loud at times talking about certain character representations in communities. She spoke about how a single bad apple can affect your community as a whole and this is why it’s imperative to have a quality code-of-conduct. Rachel also was quick to say that just because someone's behavior is awful one day doesn't mean we should be so quick to use behavior as a label. People are entitled to be real; this means they can have bad days. In other words, you are not a bad person, you did a bad thing. Here are some take-aways from the rest of Rachel’s talk:

• Small acts by everyone can be part of the problem or solution.
• Conflict, stress, and misapplied humor can make you “seem” like an a**hole.
• Conflict is healthy, conflict is different than fighting but they are often are conflated.
• Be able to see the other side “what I’m hearing you say is…”
• Intention is irrelevant
• Reflection is key, and alignment starts with developing understanding by asking “Why?”

What I took away from this as being part of a community builder in technology is that applying awareness to how we see and treat people within them is paramount. Rachel ends by saying we can avoid some common pitfalls in technology communities such as telling people to read the docs aka “RTFD”, having strong opinions weakly held and exclusionary nerdiness.

 

The last talk was by Bryan Cantrill CTO of Oxide Computer company. He talked about the importance of childhood and education. His essential message was that brain development takes time, especially regarding judgement. He observed ways in which an 18  year old can be adult-like and yet still need experimental and developmental opportunities like are afforded through higher education.

Monktoberfest this year was a genuinely enjoyable experience, and I can’t say enough about how glad I am to be a part of a company like Dell that sponsors such a great inclusive community event. Here’s hoping to see everyone next year!