Thousands of smaller regional and community-organised events run alongside vendor flagships and language conferences. In aggregate, they can require more staff time than flagship events and give teams repeated contact with developers in a specific place or technical community.
AWS Community Days
- Format. Community-led, AWS-sponsored, one-day events.
- Scale. ~30 to 60 editions per year globally.
- Locations. Hundreds of cities globally have run editions; particularly active in Europe (DACH, Nordic, Iberic), India, Latin America, and Africa.
- Audience. Local AWS users, AWS Heroes, AWS Community Builders.
Google Developer Group (GDG) events
- Format. Locally-organised meetups; some chapters host larger annual conferences (e.g., GDG DevFest).
- Scale. Hundreds of GDGs globally; thousands of events per year.
- Notable. DevFest is the annual flagship gathering of each GDG community: many cities run DevFests with several hundred attendees.
Women Techmakers events
- WTM Ambassadors organise hundreds of events globally for International Women’s Day and throughout the year.
Microsoft user groups and Reactor events
- Microsoft Reactor physical spaces (when operating) hosted meetups in San Francisco, New York, London, Tel Aviv, Sydney, Singapore, Toronto.
- Microsoft user groups. .NET User Groups, Azure User Groups globally.
DevOpsDays
A long-running and influential series of community-led DevOps conferences.
- Founded. 2009 in Ghent, Belgium.
- Format. Open-spaces unconference combined with traditional talks.
- Scale. ~50 editions per year globally.
- Cities. Run in well over 100 cities historically: Amsterdam, Atlanta, Austin, Berlin, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Detroit, Helsinki, Houston, Istanbul, London, Madison, Madrid, Melbourne, Minneapolis, Munich, Nashville, New York, Paris, Portland, Rome, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vancouver, Warsaw, Washington DC, Zurich, etc.
- Significance. Many regional DevOps cultures formed around their local DevOpsDays edition.
CNCF / Cloud Native community days
- Kubernetes Community Days (KCD). Locally-led, CNCF-sanctioned regional editions across dozens of cities (Madrid, Amsterdam, Munich, Bangalore, Pretoria, San Francisco Bay, etc.).
- CNCF-On-Tour.
All Things Open
- First held. 2013 in Raleigh, NC.
- Cadence. Annual.
- Scale. 5,000+ attendees in modern editions.
- Focus. Open source broadly, with substantial DevRel and developer-education tracks.
FOSDEM
- Founded. 2001 in Brussels.
- Format. Free, community-organised, weekend (first weekend of February).
- Scale. ~8,000 to 10,000 attendees over two days, no registration required.
- Significance. The largest pure open-source community event in Europe. Project-organised “devrooms” host hundreds of talks across dozens of communities.
OSCAFest, OSCA, and African open-source events
- OSCAFest (Open Source Community Africa Festival). Annual flagship event in Nigeria.
- DjangoCon Africa. 2023+, rotating African cities.
- PyCon Africa, PyCon Namibia, PyCon Nigeria. Regional Python events.
Asian community events
- YAPC::Asia → YAPC::Japan / DotConferences / Tokyo Rubyist Meetup / various. Long-running Asian language communities.
- JSDC Taiwan. JavaScript developer conference.
- Open Source Summit Japan / Korea / India. Linux Foundation events.
- Apsara Conference. Alibaba Cloud’s annual event in Hangzhou.
- Cloud Native Hong Kong / Singapore / Sydney. Various.
Latin American events
- Nerdearla. Argentina; very large community event.
- PyConAr, PyConBR, PyCon Chile, PyCon Brasil. Python regional events.
- CampusParty. Multinational (Brazil, Spain, others); larger more youth-oriented.
- The Developer’s Conference (TDC). Brazil, rotating cities.
Indian events
- Rootconf. DevOps / cloud / SRE conference, Bangalore.
- PyCon India. Python community.
- JSFoo. JavaScript.
- The /dev/Conference (TheDevConf India). Various.
- HasGeek conferences. Multiple smaller curated events.
- DevRelCon Bengaluru. Indian DevRel community event.
Hackathons
- Major League Hacking (MLH). North America’s primary student-hackathon organiser, founded 2013.
- Devpost. Hackathon platform with hundreds of events.
- Hack Reactor / Hacktoberfest. Annual GitHub / DigitalOcean / community open-source event, every October since 2014.
- NASA Space Apps Challenge. Annual.
- Junction (Helsinki), HackZurich. European student-led.
- Various corporate hackathons at Apple WWDC Swift Student Challenge, AWS Hackathons at re:Invent, etc.
DevFest, BarCamp, code retreats
- DevFest. GDG-organised annual flagship events; multiple per region.
- BarCamp. User-organised “unconference” format, popular 2005 to 2015.
- Global Day of Code Retreat. Annual community event focused on practice and craft.
Hyper-local meetups
Beneath all of the above sit tens of thousands of monthly local meetups organised through Meetup.com, Eventbrite, Lu.ma, or community Discord servers:
- Local language meetups (Python NYC, Rust DC, Toronto JS, Bangalore React, etc.).
- Vendor-specific user groups (Postgres User Group, AWS UG, Kubernetes UG).
- DevOps Meetup chapters.
- Women in Tech / Code chapters.
- Black in Tech / Latinas in Tech chapters.
- Local design-and-development collectives.
Local meetups are useful when a programme needs repeated contact with developers in a particular place or technical community.
Sponsoring versus organising
Most DevRel teams either sponsor existing community events or organise their own. A short heuristic:
| Goal | Tactic |
|---|---|
| Reach an existing audience | Sponsor flagship; speak at language conferences |
| Build brand at scale | Big flagship sponsorship (AWS re:Invent expo hall, KubeCon booth) |
| Meet developers in a specific locality | Sponsor local meetups; send your advocates to speak; supply food |
| Tightly control narrative | Run your own event (Sessions, SIGNAL, DAIS) |
| Build community among your users | Run a hub-and-spoke user group program (AWS UGs, HUGs, GDGs) |