Thursday and Friday last week the Couchbase EMEA Developer Advocacy team gathered in London to review 2015 and discuss our plans for 2016.
Laurent Doguin, our Developer Advocate for South Europe, joined us from Paris, Martin Esmann, who looks after the Nordics and DACH regions, from Copenhagen and James Nocentini, our Europe-wide Mobile advocate, from Brighton. I came down from Shropshire and, although she’s not part of the EMEA team, we were glad to have Laura Czajowski, our Developer Community Manager, with us to add the global perspective.
As a distributed team, time together like this is precious. Not only does it give us the opportunity for higher bandwidth communication but it’s also great to spend time together socially.
2015 for Couchbase Developer Advocacy in EMEA
2015 has been an exciting year for us on the Developer Advocacy team at Couchbase! Laura will soon post something from a team-wide perspective, but here are some of the highlights as I see them for us in EMEA:
- In January, Martin and James joined the team, bringing extensive .NET and mobile developer experience with them.
- We took Couchbase to places we’d never been before, including Romania, Estonia, Ukraine, Iceland, Morrocco and Dubai.
- We presented at Couchbase Connect in Santa Clara, Couchbase Live New York, Couchbase Live London and Couchbase Live Paris.
- We spoke at meet-ups, conferences and workshops across Europe, parts of Asia and our first steps in Africa.
- We wrote blog posts, webinars and training materials that are helping people make the most of Couchbase.
Another significant event was that Arun Gupta joined from Red Hat as our team’s VP!
My take on 2015 for Couchbase and developer relations
2015 was the year that developer relations became the central focus of everything we do at Couchbase. It’s not just for us in the dedicated Developer Advocacy team, but building awareness, credibility and community among developers is a company-wide mission.
My personal highlights were:
- Couchbase 4.0: N1QL is such a major jump in queryability for JSON documents that it opens Couchbase to whole swathes of new developers. Now Couchbase 4.1 builds on that.
- OSCON Europe: I got to speak about NoSQL query, including N1QL, at OSCON, fulfilling a personal ambition. I also spoke at many other meet-ups, conferences and workshops.
- Dublin Couchbase meet-up: our inaugural meet-up in Dublin saw around 70 people join us at Ryanair’s HQ.
- We launched and grew the Couchbase Champions and Experts programme.
- DevRelCon: I’m grateful to Couchbase for supporting me in putting on Europe’s first dedicated developer relations event!
There’s so much more but those will do for now.
2016
2016 will be another exciting year for the Couchbase developer community!
Not only will be looking for more nominations for Couchbase Champions and Experts but we’ll also be building our more and more developer-focused content. Some things to look out for:
- More audio and video: we’ll have regular developer hangouts, a podcast, screencasts and a virtual meet-up group.
- Meet-ups near you: we’ll be running Couchbase and other meetups around the world and we’d love to have you speak, so contact us!
- More in your city: if we’ve already been active in your city, then it’s likely we’ll start doing more there in 2016. You’ll also see us for the first time in many new cities.
Follow us on Twitter and join our Developer Community Newsletter to stay up to date with the Couchbase developer community. Here’s to an amazing 2016!
