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Supporting open source and making friends at OSCON

Written by Terence Bennett | July 6, 2018

Last week some of the DreamFactory team traveled to Austin Texas to attend OSCON, one of the biggest events for the open source community. We wouldn't be where we are without the open source community, so we were excited to not only be sponsoring the event, but also by connecting with folks and giving talks. Jessica Rose, our Head of Developer Relations, gave a few talks throughout the week around fandoms and imposter syndrome, as well as led a workshop on internal communications for better leadership. Alexandra Bowen, Community and Developer Relations, helped lead a discussion around engaging lurkers in an online community at the Community Leadership Summit a few days before OSCON. The rest of the team, Tracy, Matt and Joshua helped us out by manning our booth, meeting tons of awesome people and passing out SWAG. OSCON has some traditions that we love, such as the sticker table and chalkboard message wall! It's great to see the open source culture grow.



We were excited to share our vision and messaging about how DreamFactory uniquely delivers REST API solutions. We spotlighted some challenges that developers and project managers faced around building and maintaining API's that we were excited to showcase at OSCON. We help you get to market that much quicker. It's an exciting time in the open source and API fields and we are glad to be a growing part of them. It was great connecting one-on-one with attendees and listen to their challenges, ideas and pressures. We call this a community approach, and it helps us navigate these issues in a way that brings value to our users. It is the best way, and maybe the only way, to keep what DreamFactory does in sync with developers and the market. Plus, we gave away arguably some of the coolest SWAG!


SWAG

We are pretty proud of Jessica who rocked it during her multiple talks! At the Community Leadership Summit a few days before OSCON, she did a talk on Fandoms in the Community that had over 200 attendees. She also led a workshop on internal communication for better leadership and how effective communication is more than just speaking clearly. Finally, her talk on cognitive bias and imposter syndrome had a great showing of over 120 folks. We're proud, to say the least. Links to the videos and slides will get share as they become available on our social media channels.


Head of Developer Relations Jessica Rose giving her talk on Imposter Syndrome.

We all went out for a friendly dinner in Austin and invited people we met there, as well as new and old friends - it was a huge sucess. We connected with a ton of new folks and had an awesome time nerding out. We hope you join us next time.


Our new conference dinner tradition, thanks Tracy! We'll hope you join us next time.

We had some great giveaways for OSCON including a BB8, RaspberryPi, t-shirts, and an Arduino starter kit. Be sure to stop by, say hi and get yourself some SWAG next time. As always, post a pic of you with our SWAG and tag #DreamFactory for a chance to get even more, and be featured on our social media channels.


Matt from the DreamFactory team with one of our giveaway winners, Catherine, who got a Arduino Starter Kit.

These are some of our favorite types of events, because it gives us a chance to speak with the developer and open source communities we serve through DreamFactory, as well as meet and greet with the influencers. A list of our upcoming events can be found at our events page. If there's someplace you would love to see us, let us know.

We had a lot of fun and appreciate everyone who came by to say hi. Didn't stop by? Have your own fun with API's! Visit our Live API Documentation and see how to apply#DreamFactory to your projects.