Introducing Office Hours: Learn about and build on ngrok together

Not everyone installs the ngrok agent, runs ngrok http 8080 to create an endpoint and tunnel traffic from their developer environment as a test case, and then immediately rushes off to deploy it in production. For many of you, there’s a pause in that experience, where you might be left wondering: Is it just a secure tunnel? What else can I possibly do with this? And how?

First, ngrok is way more than a tunneling service. Many development and production use cases await you in the world of ngrok if you can intuit which combination of form factors, endpoint, and traffic policies will get you there.

If you’re left wondering where to find those use cases, need clarity on that vision, or have pressing questions about deploying ngrok in your devenv or in production, we have a collaborative and learning-oriented new livestream for you: Office Hours.

What you can expect from Office Hours

We aim to create a welcoming space for developers and engineers to hang out and learn more about how they’re using—or would like to use—ngrok’s unified ingress platform. Naturally, most of the focus will be on ngrok in production use cases, but we’ll also take time to learn to get to know one another, build a community that tunes in every month, and level-up all of our skills and know-how along the way.

As far as who this mystical “we” is, every session will be co-hosted by myself (Joel), Senior Developer Educator, and Scott McAllister, Principal Developer Advocate. We’ll be accompanied by a rotating guest list of ngrokkers from Product and Customer Success who have architected similar solutions for customers or directly contributed to our latest features.

We’ll ground each session with a few recurring segments:

• Short demos of use cases or scenarios where ngrok excels
• Product updates: What’s new? What’s coming?
• Open Q&A: What answers do you need from ngrokkers directly?

When you register for an Office Hours session, we give you an opportunity to prompt us with your question or feedback ahead of time. I can’t encourage that enough—not only will we prioritize addressing you during the session, but we’ll come having studied and prepared everything we need to give you an answer you can put to work straightaway.

We’ll spice things up with some additional segments that will come and go depending on who’s hosting and how we’re feeling:

• Mini-talks
• Interviews with ngrokkers
• Community showcases
• Learning together about networking

How is Office Hours different from the Developer Roundtable? While both of these livestreams are flexible, we see the Developer Roundtable oriented more toward deep-dive conversations about production use cases, and Office Hours oriented toward Q&A and 101/201-level learning about ngrok’s capabilities… and camaraderie as we tiptoe around the wild world of networking.

Reserve your spot and time to answer your questions

Our first session of Office Hours, which we’re very optimistically labeling 001, is scheduled for Wednesday, September 18th, 2024 at 9:30 am Pacific. Register now to reserve your spot and fill us in on the question or feedback you’re most eager to chat about live.

We’ll host Office Hours sessions in the middle of every month beginning in September, so if you miss your chance to join us for the first, you can register after the 18th to book our mid-October session.

Once we’ve finished our first session, you’ll always be able to catch previous Office Hours sessions on ngrok’s YouTube channel.

Come talk to us at Office Hours! Our door is open.