I have been organizing a local tech meetup in Düsseldorf, Germany, for the last 11 years. We ran it _every month_ (except for the pandemic). This year (2024), I stopped doing it.
I share a lot of comments here. Especially the effort, which is not seen/appreciated. What I don't share is the trouble finding sponsors. Local (tech) companies are often happy to sponsor a room, food, and drinks for the evening. In exchange, they get a slide in the intro speech and the opportunity to present themselves. Recruiters are not welcome. This worked pretty well. If you want this, this is a different question.
However, I summed up my learnings from organizing over 90 meetups in two blog posts:
This lib is maintained, still a bit out of date and has a few flaws. Like using the same client for JIRA Cloud and JIRA OnPremise (different APIs).
But most of the flaws have been evolved over time, while Atlassian switched strategies.
I am preparing a roadmap for v2 where I implement a lot of reliability features, like context support, but also separate APIs for OnPremise and Cloud and easier access for custom fields.
Watch the github repo if you want to stay up to date.
Author of https://github.com/andygrunwald/go-jira here:
This lib is maintained, still a bit out of date and has a few flaws. Like using the same client for JIRA Cloud and JIRA OnPremise (different APIs).
But most of the flaws have been evolved over time, while Atlassian switched strategies.
I am preparing a roadmap for v2 where I implement a lot of reliability features, like context support, but also separate APIs for OnPremise and Cloud and easier access for custom fields.
Watch the github repo if you want to stay up to date.
I am a huge fan of Go. My question here would be more like: Is this comparable? A lot of people outside of google contribute to Go.
Are similar standards applied to the Go Review Process like to internally created software?
A Question that came up while reading: What happens when I start with collecting all the ideas and too many ideas are coming up? Do I need to put a particular focus on managing these ideas? How to treat the team fairly when everyone comes with an idea?
I am an organizer of a Web Engineering Meetup in Düsseldorf, Germany, for > 6 years (https://www.meetup.com/Web-Engineering-Duesseldorf/). We run the event every month, with 50 up to 90 people. Indeed, our no-show rate is something between 40% and 50%. This is heavy, but we know it and calculate it in.
We run the complete meetup non-profit. Never put a euro in. Never got a euro out — everything based on sponsors. Our motivation is to learn, share knowledge, and have fun together. And we want to make it accessible for everyone to learn about web engineering.
Switching to the new cost model will reduce the no-show rate, but makes it 1000% times less accessible. In my opinion, Meetup.com is creating a higher barrier to enter a community. If we, the organizers, would pay for the attendees, we would pay 100$ up to 180$ every month. We have no interest to afford this.
Furthermore, what I don't get: Meetup is charging a lot of money for thousands of groups. The web platform is stale for>2 years. The last major feature was a facelift in design. But no feature that helps the organizers or users. The iOS app had some releases, but the app is far from a great UX. Flaky everywhere. I ask myself: What is this company doing? Where does all the money go?
Friends who run similar groups are thinking already to move away. Many people from the US think the same.
What so you mean by automated presubmits?
Are those „just“ CI checks for static analysis or is there more sophisticated things going on like merging it to a generated branch, deploying it, running all tests in the infrastructure there and more?
Can you elaborate a little bit more on this? Or point me to a resource that is doing this?
Technologies: The current web stack incl. container and resource scheduler. A few technologies I have worked with are Go, PHP, Redis, Memcached, MySQL, Docker, Mesos, Kubernetes, Saltstack, Chef, Apache, Nginx, Kafka, AWS/GCP
Résumé/CV: Please email me about my detailed CV. I have a bachelors degree in business economics + computer science and I am 9 years on the job. I started as a PHP programmer doing agency work with TYPO3. In the last 5 1/2 years, I am doing Site Reliability Engineering. I've helped to expand from one datacenter to five now (from the software perspective). I built a team around this. This team is lead by me since 4 years now. Since 2 years we introduced AWS and GCP into the stack for various areas. More details during a conversation.
What I am looking for: An exciting job. I am an engineering manager and software engineer with a high focus on backend and infrastructure. Let us talk!
I am running a Web Engineering Meetup in Düsseldorf, Germany [1] since more than 4 years. This group is quite big (~1.600 people) with 40 up to 100 people per Event (depends on the weather, the topic, the day, if side events happen in the city or not). We run it 100% non profit and community driven. No money is involved for paying speakers or accommodation. This is a fact where we are really proud of, because we believe if we involve money it will make things harder and more complicated. Questions like Who do pay what flight, etc.
Of course, we have food and drink sponsors. But they order the food and deliver this to us. No "direct" money involved. We run every month, except of december (because december is a busy month everywhere, company parties, family, etc.). For a german meetup, this is a quite big one (if you compare the topic and the non profit).
I want to tell you what i like and what i don't like about Meetup:
What i like:
- "Advertising" of the meetup via email: This is very good. People will be reminded, it will suggest new people your meetup depends on tags / topics and so on
- Uncomplicated for attendees: Sign up or not sign up, this is quite easy for people
What i don't like:
- The user interface: It is horrible. Especially for a meetup organizer. The editor is so limited, it is not intuitive at all
- Innovation / Change: Since nearly 4 years, meetup has changed nearly nothing. Recently they are working more and more on their iOS app (a lot of updates coming in) and a new brushed layout for the website was released, but it took way to long. Smaller changes, really iterating over it, this is what i am missing.
- Organizing a meetup: They are tools missing. Meetup is a kind of simple CURD app. But really tools for meetup organzers are missing. I know tons of companies who want to sponsor a meetup (location, food, etc.). I see tons of meetups who suffer from finding a speaker or a sponsor. I know tons of speaker who want to test their next conference talk befor eon a meetup to get feedback. Connect them. Make it easy for meetup organizers to organize one. I personally see so much potential in this area. In this regard i often ask myself "What is Meetup doing with all these employees?"
- The "pro" version: This is a joke. I tried it out. I guess the target group are meetup groups that should run all over the world (like the wordpress one). But for normal organizers, useless IMO. I expected so much from it (Statistics, deep insights in my community, what are the members interested in, etc.). So much potential.
The problem with meetup is, that without effort from people meetups will be created, 1 meetup will be held, they are disappointed that only a hand full of people showed up and they will never do it again. Because they realize that organizing a meetup is a huge effort. And only time the number of people will grow. But you need time for this.
I see a lot of groups that were created recently, but never have a meetup scheduled at all. This is sad.
Why i don't create a "better meetup"? I would love to. But the big issue here: Meetup.com has the critical mass. And signing up for a new platform etc. I wouldnt do it as an attendee. Ideas?
My unwritten goal is to provide the opportunity in Düsseldorf to visit a tech meetup every workday.
This is what i fight for and i help other organizers around to do this while connecting them and offer them my support and knowledge. A year ago i wrote a blog article about "Lessons learned from running a local meetup" [2]. I think i need to write a new one. I learned so much new things in the last year. And we try to write/document everything we need to do to organize our meetup on Github [3]. Not completed yet, but it is growing.
I share a lot of comments here. Especially the effort, which is not seen/appreciated. What I don't share is the trouble finding sponsors. Local (tech) companies are often happy to sponsor a room, food, and drinks for the evening. In exchange, they get a slide in the intro speech and the opportunity to present themselves. Recruiters are not welcome. This worked pretty well. If you want this, this is a different question.
However, I summed up my learnings from organizing over 90 meetups in two blog posts:
* Lessons learned from running a local tech meetup for 11 years (Sunday 14 January 2024) - https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-running-a...
* Lessons learned from running a local meetup (Tuesday 25 October 2016) - https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lesson-learned-from-running-a-...