A short history of the Latvia DevOps & Agile Community

Written by Uldis Karlovs-Karlovskis (read an interview with Uldis here):

the historical proof is hard to find but something like the DevOps community was founded by Accenture and me back in the summer of 2017 I think. I was the only speaker there. Some 25 people came. I was doing that to promote the upcoming DevOpsDays Riga that Edgars Letinskis, my team, and I were putting together for September.
the meetup.com group was created later in 2018 and in October its first event was an invitation to listen to my All Day DevOps conference talk
over the years we continued with quarterly events at Accenture, organized by Accenture, and visited mainly by Accenture. The organizers were changing, some people changed companies and disappeared, and organizing events started to get treated like an MM duty (inside joke) instead of an inspiring initiative. It was not working. Not as a flourishing community at least. And then Covid came
May 2021. Marcis Veveris calls me and we start bringing together “the old team” – Arturs Kovalenko, Liene Jansone, Andris Jersovs, and Edgars Biezaitis – each in a different company now. I invite Jelena Sobolevska to join as well. Out of the blue Murathan Aytekin shows up who is just a student but very excited about DevOps (and I can’t learn his name for 2 months). We start monthly online “DevOps Talk” events.
Autumn of 2021. To the event come 5 hosts and 5 attendees. Plus the speaker of course. We try to keep this memory as positive as we can but everyone is losing engagement… Somehow we didn’t give up and decided to continue. That was our lowest point.
I guess I was losing trust in the DevOps community over months and started to build the new Techies of Baltics movement to have a broader reach of people who could be interested to connect. I learned that engineers don’t want to connect as much as I was hoping for. But it is important to mention this because through this I found André Nitzschmann. And when the DevOps community was looking for premises, he kindly offered to have them at Workland for free!
Summer of 2022 – in-person meetings are allowed! Through my connections at the employer, I find a speaker from AWS. We organize the first in-person DevOps Talk and the room is full! It’s also a hell of an effort and we decide to move from monthly to bi-monthly events.
The 2nd event was half-empty. The hype was over. But more members kept showing up with each next event.
Spring of 2023 – I see that the Agile Latvia community is ending its existence. I have been a speaker at their conference twice! After a quick discussion with the DevOps community core team, I pick that up. A few months later, we’re a new brand – the Latvia DevOps & Agile Community with more energetic core team members – Anta Krumina, Agnese Zanriba, Laura Griga, and Rita Golubeva. It feels like a party, it’s the feeling of being successful.
26th of May, 2023 – we have reached 800 members on Meetup!!!