Marketing ops as code: Automating events from planning to follow-up on GitHub

I run marketing for GitHub in Japan and Korea, and events are the heartbeat of it: a recurring webinar series for enterprise developers, community meetups in Tokyo, invite-only executive sessions in Seoul. What does a developer in this market actually need right now? Which topics are worth an hour of their time, and who should be in the room? I’d happily spend all day on those questions. What follows the decisions is another matter. Once an event is greenlit, a fixed sequence begins: Duplicate a landing page on our event platform. Generate a set of UTM-tagged links: one for each channel, each formatted just so. Draft the invitation email and file a request with the team that sends it. Add the event to two project boards. Every morning until the event: download the registrant list, clean it up, post a status update for stakeholders. After the event: export the attendees, reshape the list for a CRM upload, tag the right records, and write a report. While none of these tasks are hard on their own, they’re an opportunity to paste the wrong link, skip a day, or misspell a campaign name that 15 downstream reports depend on. Here’s the thing: I used to be an engineer. My first career was keeping databases alive on Linux servers for enterprise customers. While my coding may be rusty, I can still see a pipeline begging to be automated. This is where I put GitHub Copilot to use and where you could too in your own work. So I didn’t write the code. I wrote down my runbooks, handed them to GitHub Copilot, and grew the automation in conversation. Today, an event I used to assemble by hand over a couple of days sets itself up from a single GitHub Issue, screens its own registrants every morning, and cleans up after itself when it’s over. This post walks through how that works, and why I think anyone whose job involves repetitive work across tools that offer any scriptable way in (an API, or even just a CLI) can do the same. An event is an issue I can’t claim the foundational idea