What I'd Tell Myself Before My First NOG Meeting

I don't remember the exact talk on the agenda that first time, and I couldn't tell you now which city I flew or drove into. What I remember is the feeling: that particular mix of caffeine and dread you get walking into a room where everyone else already seems to know each other.

I'd studied beforehand, read up on the topics on the agenda, made sure I could at least nod along if someone mentioned a protocol quirk or an outage from six months back. What I hadn't prepared for was the social part. Nobody warns you that the hardest fifteen minutes of a technical event happen before anyone opens a laptop, standing near a coffee urn trying to decide whether saying hi to a stranger is normal or whether it makes you look like you're trying too hard.

Looking back, I think I overrated how much everyone else had it figured out. There's a specific kind of insecurity that comes from being new to a community with history: inside jokes from years of the same people showing up, a rhythm to how sessions run, unwritten rules about which questions are fine to ask in a hallway and which ones mark you as someone who hasn't done the reading. I spent an embarrassing amount of energy trying to guess those rules instead of just asking.

The question I almost didn't ask

There was a moment, and I've had some version of it enough times since that the original has blurred into all the others, where I had a plain, simple question and sat on it for twenty minutes because I was worried it would expose me as green. When I finally asked, whoever I asked just answered it, plainly, without any of the judgment I'd built up in my head. That's the part I'd go back and tell myself: the experienced people in the room are usually not measuring you. They're mostly just tired and trying to get to the next session on time.

If I could sit next to that younger version of myself for five minutes before walking in, I don't think I'd tell him to be more confident. That kind of advice never really works. I'd tell him something smaller: nobody in that room is keeping score of how long you've been coming to these. The person who's been attending for fifteen years and the person walking in for the first time are both just there because the subject matters to them. That's a lower bar than it feels like at the time.

I'd also tell him to stop rehearsing his own introduction so much. You get one sentence about what you do and why you're there, and then the conversation moves on to something else anyway, usually a shared complaint about a vendor or a story that has nothing to do with you. Let it move on.

Communities like that get built slowly, by people who kept showing up even when they felt like the least qualified person in the room. Nobody arrives already belonging. You just come back enough times that the room starts to feel familiar, and one day you notice you're the one explaining an old joke to someone new, without remembering exactly when that changed.

I don't know if the version of me at that first meeting would have believed any of this. I'd tell him anyway, just in case some of it sticks.