In the year 2004, we had an idea: What if we met on Sunday for a late breakfast or early lunch (hence the word “brunch”) and talked about software, software development and IT in general while we ate?
The “brunch” theme pinpointed the time: 11 o’clock. The presence of food implied the presence of a dining table, something we found in our company kitchen (and later directly besides it). This defined the place: The kitchen of the Softwareschneiderei became the location to meet, eat and talk every other month, six times a year.
The brunches had no real structure or guest list, we showed up and were open to contributions, ideas and nearly everything that happened, as long as it fitted the shared interest of the participants.
For 20 years, we continued this series of events. It was great fun, real inspiration and always a source for thoughts and new ideas. Because it was designed as a meeting in presence, we had some challenges over the years:
First, the list of regular guests grew until the demand for some kind of transcript of meetings that were missed added the habit of “recap blog entries”. You can still find them, they have their own category on our blog:
https://schneide.blog/category/events/dev-brunch/
The recap was dropped when we shared more details about topics on the mailing list that acted as a planning tool for the meetings.
Second, in early 2020, we were faced with the reality that in-person meetings wouldn’t be feasible for quite some time. We didn’t have a crystal ball that could predict the future of the corona pandemic, so we couldn’t be sure, but we had some knowledge about the 1918 influenza pandemic from the book “Pale Rider”, written by Laura Spinney that some of us read in 2018. We took it as a prediction of the things that might come and switched to online meetings, which changed the character of the brunch, not least because nobody ate on camera anymore. The beginning of the pandemic was an eventful period for us, as we not only changed the Dev Brunch, but also everything else in our daily work.
A third thing became obvious when it would have been feasible to meet in person again: Everybody lives somewhere else now. We would have a stark drop in attendance if we went back to in-person brunches, just because of basic geography. We considered hybrid events, but they might have been the “worst of both worlds” instead of a good compromise.
The fourth thing that is about to change is the discontinuation of our mailing list infrastructure. This might sound like a small thing, but we take privacy and data protection really seriously and don’t want to move e-mail addresses around without proper consent by everybody. If we build up a new equivalent to the mailing list, we will start from scratch with proper agreements. Again, this might sound over the top in comparison to other companies’ conduct in regard to e-mail addresses, but that’s no reason to act the same.
So, this is farewell to a series of events that helped shape us the way we are. The Dev Brunch was a wonderful idea that facilitated our passion: software development. That doesn’t mean we are less passionate or less inclined to talk for hours about software development. It just means that the setting of future talks will be different.
Let us stay in touch!
Schneide Blog 