Brown Bag Lunch

Before I started working full time as a Developer Advocate, I had never come across the term BBL. Just reading the title of this post should already disprove the theory that it belongs exclusively to the medical world. It turns out that it does not.

So what exactly is a BBL and what is it not?

I first heard about the concept from my older colleague and a true DevRel veteran, David Pilato. The acronym stands for Brown Bag Lunch. The name comes from the classic brown paper bag with a sandwich inside. Not a three-course lunch. Not a formal dinner. Just something simple you bring with you.

That brown paper bag is the core idea behind a BBL.

Most live tech talks happen at conferences, evening meetups, JUG meetings, internal company trainings, or occasionally a Saturday CodeRetreat. If you cannot attend those events, you simply miss out on the technical social life. Not everyone can spend five days traveling to a three-day conference. Not everyone lives in a capital city. Logistics, family, distance, work. Real life gets in the way.

This is where the Brown Bag Lunch comes in.

Instead of going out for lunch and scrolling through your phone while waiting for your meal, you can use that lunch break differently. Bring a sandwich. Or a salad in a box. Just please avoid reheated fish in the microwave. Then gather in the largest meeting room available in your office and attend a live tech session while eating.

You do not travel across the country.
You do not even need to leave your office.
It is still a live, in person meeting.
And it fits into your lunch break.

In simple terms: BBL equals a meetup hosted at your company. You do not go to the speaker. The speaker comes to you.

How much does it cost? In the context of my current role, it is completely free. That seems like a fair price.

What do you need to do to host one? Not much. Reach out to me. We agree on a date and a topic. That is basically it.

The Brown Bag Lunch sessions I run while working for Elastic follow a few simple rules:

• I do not sign any documents, especially no NDA.
• Nobody pays anyone. It is based on mutual trust and a handshake agreement.
• It is not consulting and not formal training.
• Topics revolve around the Elastic stack: search (BM25 and vector search), AI use cases, observability, ES|QL, and related subjects.
• The session usually has two parts. First I present a topic. Then we switch to informal office hours.
• The atmosphere is relaxed. We do not record the session. A hybrid option is possible if needed.
• The minimum requirement is a meeting room provided by the host company for the duration of the talk and the lunch. If the company wants to provide food and drinks for the participants and the speaker, that is perfectly fine and sometimes happens.

When it comes to scheduling, I cannot accept every request. Most sessions happen alongside conferences or other trips. Sometimes it is even possible to run two BBLs in the same city on the same day, since not everyone takes their lunch break at the same time. I have already hosted more than a dozen of these sessions across Poland and Europe, and some of them were described on LinkedIn.

That is the whole idea.

If you are hungry for knowledge from the Elastic stack and a baguette from a brown paper bag, just reach out. Let us see what we can do about it.