dotplus: tech meetups 2.0

dotplus.md

dotplus

dotplus is a group of mobile/web/hardware developers that come together once a month to talk about software development. The goals are:

• Everyone learns something.
• Everyone has fun.
• Everyone meets somebody new.

A typical night will look like the following:

• 7:00 - Registration/mingling
• 7:15 - Short presentation on a beginner topic (preferably by a beginner)
• 7:30 - More advanced presentation. Could be a deep code-dive into Rails, story about an open-source project, or demo of a raspberry pi setup.
• 8:15 - Hacking. We encourage attendees to bring any coding problems, or interesting code to look at. We'll break the group up into smaller groups for hacking or just chatting.
• 9:00 - End of official meetup, but small group heads down to the bar.

How is this different than a regular meetup?

We will constantly be searching to find the right formula. That will vary by group and location, but we want to reflect on our past sessions to find out what is working well and what is it. We will have regular meeting with the organizers in different cities to find that formula.

Beginner focused talk

Just a quick one to start the night off. This is to give new people experience giving presentations, and so beginners and advanced folk alike will gain something from the meetup.

Mix of hack-night and presentations

Presentations are what get people to come to a meetup and what give people topics to chat about. Pairing on problems is an incredibly powerful way to meet new people. Developers are not only comfortable around programming, but they really enjoy it as well. It's also yet another way to get people to learn something new.

Discourage recruiters and job hunters

This isn't a place to get a job, it's a place to make friends and learn new things.

The app

The real power of rubyragers comes from the app that tags along with it. Meetup.com is the status quo today, but it has many problems that I won't get into, but I will get into what dotplus will do differently.

Twitter Authentication

Probably solely. Using this not only greatly simplifies registering for the event, but also allows us to print nametags out with everyone's name and handle. This doubles as the check-in process and allows the organizer to know who showed up and who didn't simply by people taking their nametags. Also, after the event, we can send out a page that allows people to see a list of the attendees to the event along with follow buttons so they can easily reconnect with their new friends.

Achievements

Let people show off attending 3 meetups in a row. Let people show off speaking at events.

Speaker tools

Let them link their slides to the site. Edit their bio. Edit the abstract. Also, meetup.com shows the organizer as the top person at an event, we show the speaker.

Spreading organically. The fact the group is not on meetup.com will result in a lower attendance rate, worse SEO, and make the group difficult to find for those new to the area/software. I actually see these as advantages. Meetups can often be a group of strangers. If everyone that comes has someone else in the group they know, they will be more inclined to socialize and feel more comfortable overall having mutual friends. It will probably result in a smaller group, but a closer one.

I think this is great. I really like the noobie presentation because it lets younger members contribute to the group, which in-turn will make them more comfortable. Put another way, it breaks down the awkward barrier of just being a lurker because you get to present and gain some legitimacy in the group.

I think killing meetup is really powerful and I like the twitter focus. We could use prawn to generate a PDF document that aligns perfectly with a specific brand of printer-friendly name tags.

Speaker tool: use this for presentations - https://github.com/bloudermilk/slyde - Brendan made slyde for our Intro to Rails class because he hated the pdf slides.

Agree on the last point. Friction = quality leads becauses its invite-only as its word-of-mouth only by default.

My big question mark is the hacking portion. I've never been to an event like this before so very curious about how it will go, what the format it like, etc. At other groups, is it pretty easy for everyone to form groups and hack? Or will be get to develop some structure and best practices for that as well?

Glad you like it! Slyde is what the ruby course is built in right? I heard good things about it.

Good question on the hack piece, and it's the most experimental part of this for me. I may end up dropping it, but the goal is to get more audience participation.

It comes from a 'trick' I like to do at conferences. If I see other developers hanging around, at the airport, or during some downtime. I like to go up and ask 'hey, do you know anything about string encoding in Ruby?' In my experience every time it has resulted in me opening up my laptop and spending a few minutes looking around at code. Pairing with a new person always results in learning new command line or ruby tricks and it also is an easy way to get to know a new person. It's worked well for me, so I want to try doing it on a larger scale.

Love every part of it, but IMHO there is a very effective way to supercharge the learning idea.

Make it language/framework/idiom agnostic.

1. Helps dampen the echo chamber circle jerk phenomenon
2. Keeps low-merit idiomatic crap in check
3. Really plays nicely with the beginner/advanced split. We cannot all be advanced in everything, so even experienced programmers will be learning from beginner topics on frameworks and languages they have not heard of.

And, this lets us widen the name scope to pick something really catchy.

Also, totally going to put hours in on this, and may be able to recruit a frontend fella to help.

/cc @Polyrhythm

I'm super psyched you guys are interested! I've been wanting to do this for months now, but honestly the name has been the number 1 thing holding me back.

I have gone back and forth re the ruby focus. On the one side, I personally am more interested in learning about frameworks and toolsets I don't use as I would learn more.

On the other, I have always enjoyed the people in the ruby community. I've always felt they have a good balance of super smart people and a practical focus. I also think that there is certain value in having a good baseline. It's just like in college how higher level courses are more interesting than the overviews since they can dive deeper. If the speakers have a general idea the knowledge they would be able to dive deeper.

I really have gone back and forth about this. I am kind of agreeing with you on the naming thing though. If we're doing it in different cities it would be best for the individual organizers to be flexible.

Everything in here is up for debate though, I think it'll take a few sessions before we can really hammer down the formula.

/cc @jumph4x @Polyrhythm @thebucknerlife since github doesn't seem to send notifications on gists otherwise

Doesn't notify me via github notification light in the top left. I guess I need to explicitly turn on gist comment mentions email notifications...

Whether this is Ruby-strictly or Ruby-mostly or free-for-all, I'm down.