DevOpsGirls becomes a community

Article by Javier Turegano
Published on Read in 3 mins

DevOpsGirls started a year ago with a bunch of enthusiastic REA people who wanted to make a difference in diversity in Tech, particularly with women who are interested in DevOps.

After running two highly engaging bootcamps we have been discussing a lot about what’s next for this initiative. REA has been an amazing incubator of the idea and has provided everything that we needed so far to kick-start the movement, but among the organisers we had a feeling that if we wanted to reach the next level we needed bigger support from other individuals and organisations. That’s difficult to do if it’s attached to a single sponsor. With the great response we have had from the industry and the beautiful experience of having external coaches joining the previous boot camp has help us determine the next step.

And so — I am super happy to announce that DevOpsGirls will become part of DevOps Australia – an organisation well know for running conferences like DevOps Down Under! Thanks to Matt Jones for the support and we really believe this is a step in the right direction and would help DevOpsGirls operate in a more effective way.

Theresa Neate, John Contad and myself, Javier Turegano will be the initial members of a subcommittee on DevOps Australia responsible to make DevOpsGirls an even a bigger community.

We really believe that this will be a great umbrella for the community and will help us realise the dream of helping women in their careers or personal interest in the DevOps field.

REA will continue to contribute and sponsor the community, as we are still deeply committed to this mission; so we look forward to welcome all the support from other members of the tech space going forward. With this movement toward a community we are also looking at diversifying the community offering we have, beyond the bootcamps. By the way, we are already in the planning for the next one that will probably be hosted by our friends at Carsales! Thanks Mai Nguyen for voluteering, we’ll kick off the logistics soon.

I tried to summarise our vision for DevOpsGirls in the following diagram, where I see DevOpsGirls as a community that helps connect the growing community of women interested in DevOps to interesting initiatives:

If you follow DevOpsGirls on Twitter you probably have already seen that John Contad has just launched a set of weekend workshops for women interested in DevOps that will kick off in the New Year. I would definitely recommend joining the meetup group if interested in attending, as John is one of the best teachers I’ve come across and has a passion to keep innovating in this area.

I’m also really happy to announce that at REA we will be running a program called “Train with us”, which will open some of our amazing technical internal training for our employees, to people in the community that may not have the luxury of attending this type of training in their day jobs. The first three training modules that we will trial through the program include our 3-day AWS training, the 1-day Docker intro and the 1-day Elastic Search training. During this training sessions a few community members will be able to enjoy the training sessions alongside REA engineers. I’ll soon announce the dates of the training sessions and how to join.

Finally, don’t forget our Slack channel and ping us through Twitter @devopsgirls if you want to join. There we will also be making the announcements of the new training opportunities to continue building an active conversation around DevOps.

Can’t wait to see what we can achieve in the new year within the DevOpsGirls community.

 

Interested in learning more about REA Group? Check out other posts in this tech blog, the REA Group blog and careers site.

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