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Serverless Chats

142 EpisodesProduced by Jeremy Daly & Rebecca MarshburnWebsite

Serverless Chats is a podcast that geeks out on everything serverless. Join Jeremy Daly and Rebecca Marshburn as they chat with a special guest each week.

43:25

Episode #27: ServerlessDays Going Global with Ant Stanley

About Ant Stanley:

Ant is a consultant and community organizer. He founded and currently runs the Serverless User Group in London, is part of the ServerlessDays London organizing team and the global ServerlessDays leadership team. Previously Ant was a co-founder of A Cloud Guru, and was responsible for organizing the first ServerlessConf event in New York in May 2016. Living in London since 2009, Ant's background before Serverless is primarily as a Solution Architect at various organisations, from managed service providers to Tier 1 telecommunications providers. He started his career in 1999 doing Y2K upgrades in his native South Africa, and then spent 5 years being paid to write VB6. His current focus is Serverless, GraphQL and Node.js.


Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week, I'm chatting with Ant Stanley. Hi, Ant. Thanks for joining me.

Ant: Hey Jeremy. It's a pleasure to be here.

Jeremy: You're the co-founder of ServerlessDays Global. Why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what ServerlessDays is all about.

Ant: Yes, I helped co-found ServerlessDays in 2017. I've been an early member of the Serverless community. I originally was one of the co-founders of A Cloud Guru and helped get Serverless [Consults 00:00:30] off the ground. After leaving Cloud Guru, I took a year off, worked on a few side projects, then joined up with a few folks here in London, and we decided to get a community-based Serverless conference going. It was supposed to be one conference called JeffConf. Then, it took off and became a thing of its own due to the amazing community. That's pretty much, not quite how we got there, but it's the start of how we got to where we are.

Jeremy: All right. I actually want to talk to you about ServerlessDays. So I helped co-organize ServerlessDays Boston, a crazy event. I went to one in New York, and I've seen, basically, these ones all over the place now. I went to one in Milan. This is becoming a pretty big thing. So, there's all kinds of ways people can get involved. There's some really, really great speakers at these events, but I just want to talk about, really, how this got started. Let's go way back to the beginning, understand what the motivation was behind it. Then, let's talk about some of the events that are happening around the world and, then maybe, how people can get involved. Why don't we start with that? What's the history of this whole thing?

Ant: The history, it goes back to April, May 2017. There was due to be a Serverless conference in Amsterdam, run by the then organizers of the Serverless user group in Amsterdam, and it, kind of, fell apart. I think end of April, beginning of May, it got canceled. I don't think they could raise enough sponsorship funds. I think they were trying to go too big, and, at the time, that was going to be the only Serverless conference in Europe that year. So at the time, I ran the... Well, I still do... run the Serverless user group in London, which is the largest Serverless user group in the world at this point in time. I had a conversation with Paul Johnston. He used to work for AWS and he's one of the early the early Serverless bloggers or contributors, and James Thomas is a Developer Advocate for IBM, on their OpenWhisk functions platform. He's also London-based.

The three of us had a conversation via a Slack channel. I'm saying, "Well, there isn't anything happening in Europe this year. Why don't we try and organize something?" What became an idea, started to become reality, and Paul popped up, and he said, "I might have a venue that's really cheap." So I said, "Well, I've got a user group with a whole bunch of users, and we don't have anything planned in the summer because that's normally an awful time to run a user group cleanup. So, I said, "Well, let's try and run an event." We decided to call it JeffConf, based on a very bad joke, because of the name Serverless. The in-joke, at the time, was we could've called Serverless anything. We might as well have called it Jeff. So, as a joke, we decided to call this thing JeffConf.

We organized it in six weeks from the point of saying, "Yes, let's do this," to actually running the event. It was a six-week window. We didn't run a CFP. We ran on an absolute shoestring. We spoke to whoever we could. Companies jumped in to sponsor. So the first tweet we put up about it, Chris Munns, from AWS jumped all over it and said, "Hey, can we sponsor?" IBM got involved. A few other companies, local London agencies, also got involved.

Yeah, We managed to get off the ground. We had some great speakers. We had Simon [Woodley 00:04:01], that I've been trying to get into my user group for ages. I managed to convince him to come to London for the day, and he gave our opening keynote. We basically managed to cobble together a great among of local, predominately, London/UK-based speakers to come speak, and it worked. We had about 170 people attend, which wasn't bad for such a short period of time. We somehow made a tiny profit on it because we managed to get a venue, which was the St John's Church in Hoxton, 196-year-old church, where Paul was friends with the pastor who runs it. So we ran it in a 196-year-old church in the middle of Hoxton Shoreditch area, which is the heart of London's tech scene. We had some great speakers and basically had a beautiful day, and it was a great day out.

That was the first JeffConf, and we didn't really think we would go further than that, at that point in time.

Jeremy: But it is sort of fitting that the first ServerlessDays was in a church because Serverless is, kind of, a religion, if you think about it, to some people.

Ant: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it definitely is a religion for a lot of people. Yeah, it is, kind of, fitting, and we've made jokes about Serverless dogma and religion, but it is fitting. Ironically, part of the reason it did take off is, when we announced that two Italians got on a plane and helped us out. Alex Calaboni and .... They came over and helped us out. Then, Alex, at the end of it, said, "Hey, I want to run this in Milan." So, it's like, "Well, we didn't have any plans beyond running once, so yeah, you can go ahead. If you want to run it in Milan, go for it."

Two and a half months later, it was the end of August. So first ServerlessDays was in first week of July, first Serverless JeffConf. Then, it was in September of 2017, Alex ran JeffConf from Milan, copied by my awful, awful website that I'd designed. It was a point where I thought rolling my own single-page app framework was a good idea. It's being used for sum total of three websites, which is more than it ever needed to be. So, he put that together. I think he had about 150, or so, attendees the first one. He had a whole month extra to organize it and that was a great event.

Then, Soenke from Hamburg, was one of the speakers of that ServerlessDays at that JeffConf. He approached Justin and says, "Hey, he wants to run this in Hamburg." So, at that point, he said, "Well, if you want to do it, and you want to put the effort in, we'll help you." So, Soenke decided, with some of his colleagues, at the company he'd ju...

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