My Journey with NSBM DevOps Community

NSBM DevOps Community is where I found my passion towards event organizing when I helped in organizing events as a volunteer and I joined to lead NSBM DevOps Community events for the year 2015 thanks to one of my colleagues (Ravindu Pasan). The DevOps community was created by a group of computing students from National School of Business Management (NSBM) to sharpen the programming skills of the NSBM students to the level required by the industry’s leading software companies. You can find more about NSBM DevOps Community from here.

I was a co-lead organizer for 7 events by NSBM DevOps Community and all of those events were a great experience for my life in many ways where I learnt many different things other than organizing workshops/ seminars to help students ( How to deal with people with different attitudes, How to make connections with people, How to balance volunteering with education, Email etiquettes and public speaking...etc). 

The first ever session I co-leaded in organizing was an Android Development workshop series with a friend of mine(Milroy Fraser, Co-founder and CEO of Olionsoft) who is a past student of NSBM itself. However, the results were not as expected and at the end of the 3 days series only two applications had been developed by attendees, but still, it is glad that we could make an impact even that was small.

The very first big event we organized was 'Mind Behind a Startup', a seminar on experience sharing and tips on entrepreneurship by two young experienced founders in Sri Lankan tech industry. Less than 48 hours before the event, I got a phone call from one of the invitees that he won't be able to make it since he is not well in health. Since we already published all the posters about event both online and offline, I was shocked at the moment what to do and it was my first ever experience in such a situation. But gladly through some connections of SL2College (Guarantee) Limited, which I am a volunteer, I was able to find another speaker (Bhagya Silva) for the session within the next day. Our designers were helpful enough to create new event flyers within a short period of notice and we ran out a quick marketing plan evening before the event. 

However, the event was a huge success with the help of all our volunteers and co-organizers. You can find event photos from here. 

The next session was 'Inversion 2015', a seminar on Internet of Things. It was another big hit event organized by us. Once at a tech meetup, I had a chat with a speaker to have a session at NSBM and I used that contact for this event. He (Ramindu Deshapriya, Senior Consultant Technology at Virtusa) helped us organizing the event from the side of Virtusa where we did the event in collaboration with Virtusa. 

At the end of the session apart from the IoT topics, he shared his experience at Google Summer of Code not only as a participant but also as a mentor which was really a valuable session for participants. The event was concluded with my vote of thanks on behalf of the organizers. 

We, co-organizers didn't forget to take a photo after the event.

We couldn't take a break after the 'Inversion 2015'. Through the connections from SL2College (Guarantee Limited), a friend (Rashmikaa Nawarathne, Senior Software engineer at 99X Technology) contact me and Pasan to check possibilities on doing a session at NSBM on Hybrid Mobile Application Development with 99X Technology. Why should we say 'NO', we said 'YES, we are ready to organize' that since we understood how important it is having a hand on training on hybrid mobile application development. 

It was a great experience for all the participants and was another huge success. As always I expressed my gratitude towards all the participants and speakers on behalf of co-organizers of the session.

Below photo was taken with all the organizers, some speakers and volunteers of the workshop after a successful event.

NSBM had their open day 2015 on September and we represented NSBM DevOps Community there. A set of volunteers helped us to make decorations, design posters and prepare exhibition items. 

The next session is where I worked with Google Developer Group(GDG) Sri Lanka to conduct a session at NSBM. Planning chat went for some time and finally we had a code lab session on coding with Go language and using GitHub at the end of the year 2015. 

This is a photo taken with event volunteers and GDG Sri Lanka leads.

Then a busy schedule came up for all the co-organizers with studies, exams and internships so we couldn't organize any event or to hand over the community to our juniors, it is really bad though. However, I managed to make it at the end. Same as we found speakers for Inversion 2015, this time also we got a speaker through a contact I made at a tech meetup (Janaka Rangama, an Enterprise Cloud Architect at VirtusaPolaris). He did a great session on Cloud Computing and students raised a lot of questions to him very enthusiastically. Previous co-organizers with new co-organizers organized the event and there was an unexpected number of crowd where even the venue was not enough everyone to get seated. 

Below picture is me presenting the token of appreciation to the speaker.

However, it was a great journey with NSBM DevOps community where I helped many students to improve their coding skills, improve technical knowledge while building my own skills (event organizing, email etiquettes, time management.. etc) and making a network around myself.