This post is from the perspective of someone that helped organize the event and did some mentoring. NodeSchool LA was held at Blackline offices in Woodland Hills. This is different from the past 2 NodeSchool LA events as they were in the Santa Monica, Playa Del Ray area. The past 2 events averaged about 45 attendees. This event there were 20 attendees. I was both helping oranizing the event and did a few mentoring tasks but with five mentors being on hand, I really didn't need to mentor. Overall the day went smooth, was fun, relaxing and enjoyable. I love seeing people learn.
I was concerned with the parking and people needing to be escorted to the 11th floor where the event was taking place, but the signage we put up to direct people to text a phone number when they arrived worked great. More signs were placed for check-in and where the bathrooms were. The 11th floor area where the training rooms were is large so some portions that needed to blocked off from entry had tables in front of them. This worked good as this reduced the number of people needed to be physically available to help with blocking traffic to certain areas.
Some recruiters were available on the day of and recruiting itself wasn't pushed onto the attendees so it was great that the event is always focused on Node.js and learning; recruiting is secondary. There were a few people that took advantage of the recruiter that day so I thought that was cool that people could do that in case they were interested.
People were able to focus on workshoppers for 3 hours. The table triangle setup tip gleaned from one of the workshopper guides was fantastic. It sparked people collaborating and interacting with each other more. This lead to a slightly louder event but in the grand scheme I think this was okay because people were enjoying. I think on the next event if the location is small, I can give a warning to attendees beforehand to bring in some headphones in case it gets too noisy.
We had an abundance of food and drink. There was some beer and I'm thinking it's not really needed as people are more focused on learning and it's not really a social gathering; although it is social, but not in the sense where people are focused on conversating and relaxing. Pizza was okay but it would be nice to change this up for the next one, and of course have more healthier options. Sandwiches, veggies, fruit and chips is my vote for the next one.
For the workshopper itself, another great tip that was gleaned from last event feedback and the guides from a Mentor wiki from [http://github.com/nodeschool/sanfrancisco](NodeSchool San Francisco). It noted to give an overview of the different types of workshoppers so people can do one that fit the level they were at. This gave people a sense of what to take on and some direction of what they can try next if they were further along. Current responses from this event's survey actually confirmed this worked great. We will do this again.
The quality of help the mentors gave was fantastic. The mentors did great to not give answers right away to attendees. This reduced the pressure on mentors needing to have all the answers and gave attendees debugging capabilities they will carry with them in growing as programmers. None of these events can happen without people willing to help so I think it's awesome to see people volunteering their time to help others learn.
After every event, we send out a survey to both the attendees and mentors. Here's some feedback when asked what they liked about the event:
The ability to choose a learning path aligned to my ability. The structure of the exercises was great. The mentors are awesome and super helpful and positive!!!
Liked the smaller triangle desk formation over long line of desks at [last place]. Kick ass coffee maker. Smaller turnout -> more time with mentor
We had a great turn out of more women that code, yay! They made up 20% of the group. Here's some twitter feedback:
One very cool highlight was that someone attended and never coded before. She was able to learn the command-line terminal, setup the workshopper, go through it, and code her first lines of JavaScript. To do all that within 3 hours I personally think is amazing and the fact that someone got exposed to something new and enjoyed it, I can only imagine how fun and exciting it will be for all they learn and put into practice.
The other thing we were able to do was to take a group photo. Celebration!
