CNCF Meets Docker: Spreading the Word in Dublin

It’s a grey Tuesday evening in Dublin, but one step in the door to the bright, buzzy Workday office on May Lane, and the enthusiasm in the air is palpable. This is the first time the well-known Docker Dublin group has partnered up with another meet-up group, in this case, Cloud Native. As one of the organisers, Dave Doran, puts it: “It’s great we can get the speakers and the people here, but how do we spread the word even further? By partnering with others. CNCF are a steering committee around core technologies, and they’re one of the most interesting emerging meet-ups. We’re interested in creating a network. We have a great facility here in Workday, and we’re happy to share this.”

The Second Largest in the World

Dave and his colleague Thomas have been running the Docker meet-up since 2015 – and Docker is one of the hottest technologies on the scene right now. The meet-up itself, which has rapidly grown over the last 7 months, is the second largest Docker meet-up in the world. Pretty impressive considering Ireland’s size. Dave explains: “Peak attendance has been around 180 people. Typically, the number of attendees would be 80, and it’s not just people living in Dublin who are interested. We have people in the industry contacting us who are based everywhere from Israel to Chicago, asking for Docker meet-ups to be organised for their trips over here.”

Early Access

The group have a great close relationship with Docker, Inc. which means they’re always kept well-informed. Dave notes: “We regularly get early access to new products and training materials, which Tom dives deeply into. He will actually often go into interested companies and give free training sessions.”

Back to the night itself, which, amidst a mountain of pizza and snacks, included a talk from the highly successful John Doran of Irish start-up, Phorest. Doran spoke about how Docker helped his company to resolve platform system stability issues as their customer base began to grow larger, streamline deployments and even reduce hosting costs.

Quality Content

So, what does Dave make of the Irish tech scene? “It’s hard to keep up! You could be at a tech meet-up twice a night every night with the way things are going. And it’s completely on par with what you’d see in San Francisco in terms of what’s being covered, the quality of content, and the speakers. We’re not missing skills in this country, we’re just missing the quantity. It’s not slowing down either.”

Browse the Latest Tech Events in Ireland

We couldn’t agree more. Interested in attending a meet-up near you? Take a look at the latest tech events coming up on our events page.