Last week, I visited London for the January Docker meetup, which was the first time I'd attended this group.
It was a talk-oriented format, with around 200 attendees packed into Shoreditch Village Hall; free pizza and beer was provided thanks to the sponsors, which was awesome (and makes logistics easier when you're travelling there from work).
There were three talks.
First, Andrew Martin from British Gas spoke about how they use Docker for testing and continuous deployment of their Node.js microservices - buzzword bingo! But it's helpful to see how companies approach these things.
Second, Johan Euphrosine from Google gave a short demo of Google Cloud Platform for running Docker containers (mostly around Container Engine, but also briefly App Engine). This was relevant to my interests, but I'd already seen this sort of talk online.
Third, Dan Williams presented his holiday photos featuring a journey on a container ship, which wins points from me for liberal interpretation of the meetup topic, and was genuinely very entertaining/interesting - I just regret having to leave to catch a train halfway through.
In summary, this was worth attending, but as someone just getting started with containers I'd love some sort of smaller meetings with opportunities for interaction/activity. There's such a variety of people/use cases for Docker that I'm not sure how much everyone had in common with each other; it would be interesting to find out.