NN1 Dev Club has launched - and it's already making waves at the Vulcan Works
Last night saw the first edition of NN1 Dev Club - a new quarterly event for developers, held at the Vulcan Works in Northampton. We caught up with co-founders Pawel Grzybek and Darren Sharp to find out how it went and about their plans for the future.
DN: So how did the first NN1 Dev Club go?
PG: For the first event, I’m very pleased. We had around 45 people who turned up so it was a pretty good turnout and we had good fun.
It was really incredible to see people socialising together, bonding and forming a new community here in Northampton.
Putting on this event, and especially because it’s free for people to come to, gives me tons of satisfaction. Now we just want the people who were there to spread the word and encourage more people to join in.
Good speakers also helped for the first event and I'm very excited to say that for the next one, we've got absolutely amazing speakers lined up as well. We can’t reveal who they are just yet but they’re definitely going to be popular.
DN: We heard from Darren about this previously, but what’s your background Pawel, and why did you want to start a meetup event?
PG: My background is in software engineering. I’ve been writing software for the past 15 years, and professionally for around 11 or 12 years. And at exactly the same moment when I started doing it professionally, that's when I moved from Warsaw to Northampton.
In bigger cities in Europe - London, Berlin, Warsaw - and in other cities in the UK like Leicester, there are meetups for specific technologies. So since I moved to Northampton, I always wanted to have something like that but I just didn't have enough experience. I didn't have enough confidence. I didn't know people around who could help me to organise it.
But recently it felt like the right moment to start doing something like that. So I connected with Darren, because at the time I was looking for a job and he’s a tech recruiter so it was a good match - and he was very keen to support this idea. He’s got a great network here. He knows so many people, and that's exactly what I was looking for. I didn’t know how many tech companies we had here in Northamptonshire. It turns out - there are a lot!
I was aware of Digital Northants events and The Marketing Meetup, but I wanted to create something a little bit more technical for developers, where people aren’t going to be afraid to show a bit of code and get more technical about how things are achieved.
Still, there is a crossover because both crowds are very much invited to join both of them.
DS: I could probably have put on an event like this as a business owner as it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but it wouldn’t have had the gravitas of having a developer helping to organise it. That gives it the weight, having Pawel involved. It’s run in conjunction with a developer, with developers in mind.
DN: Who were the speakers at the first event and what did they talk about?
PG: Both of these speakers are people who I've worked with in the past. One of them is PJ Evans, from Milton Keynes. He is a very well-known expert on the Internet of Things.
He is one of the publishers of Pi magazine, which is a printed magazine for Raspberry Pi enthusiasts.
PJ showed us how you can build a simple IoT device and also how complex it can get. He was extremely funny, talking about how he built a huge IoT system around his aquarium, with everything connected to Raspberry Pi. His talk covered everything from a Scottish toilet emergency, that military-grade security aquarium and an extinction-level event in the suburbs of Milton Keynes.
The next speaker was Dr Junade Ali, who’s an absolute genius in lots of areas. He is an incredibly good software engineer, but over the years he moved into more of a data science space.
Working in a digital environment for many years gave him lots of insights. He accumulated all of these into a talk mostly about vulnerabilities about burnout in our industry and about the depression that is hard to avoid, about unfair workplaces and so on.
It was a contrast from the humour of PJ’s talk but it’s a very important subject. He’d assessed the real-world performance of engineering teams and interviewed thousands of people.
DN: What sort of crowd did you bring in?
PG: I did a show of hands at the start and I’d say it was 70% professionals who earn a living through writing software, 15% hobbyists and 15% students. So we’d like to get more students to the next one. We hadn’t realised they’d broken up for Easter, so we’ll be more aware of term times for when we organise the next one, because it’s really important for us that we get students along to learn as much as possible. And we had contact from students who want us to keep them posted on the next event, which is great.
For me the biggest joy was to see all these 40 people socialising together and I noticed that people came with bunches of friends, but they mixed really well and they started socialising with each other. After that, we went up to the Maule Collective bar and we stayed there for the next two hours.
DS: You could tell there were one or two people who were a bit nervous about attending, who were sitting in the corner to start with, headphones on. I went to chat to someone to break the ice and by the end of the night, he was chatting away to people. So for me, that’s mission accomplished in terms of bringing people together.
There are so many developers in this area. We’re only scratching the surface.
DN: Presumably the The Vulcan Works is the perfect venue for an event like this?
DS: It is, and hopefully we can be of benefit to them too. We had a couple of business owners come along last night as well. One of them has got a dev company and wants space for seven or eight devs, they had a tour of the Vulcan Works after the event and hopefully that’s another benefit of NN1 Dev Club, getting people to see what the Vulcan Works is all about and if it’s right for them, like it was right for SSA, then that works for everyone.
I've known Pawel for years, and it was really the Vulcan Works that sparked us having a face-to-face catch-up, and this is what came out of talking to each other.
I’ve found, in general, developers want to feel comfortable going into a new environment. So we wanted somewhere central, somewhere that’s easy to get to, it ticked all the boxes.
PG: The only problem we might have in the future is if we continue to grow and is it going to be big enough to fit three or four times the size of the crowd we had last night. That might be jumping ahead a little bit though, and it’s a nice problem to think about.
Want to know more?
Find out more about NN1 Dev Club.