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Adincath
Adincath

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What do you like about meetups?

I am from the rural south and the availability of meetups in my area is slim! If someone wanted to start doing coding meetups in their area, what would you want to see there?

Top comments (6)

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chinjon profile image
Jonathan Chin

I just started a JavaScript meetup in a city right outside of New York City. My main motivation is that NYC has so many meetups and the towns/cities just around it don't have a large programming community since everyone just heads to or works in NYC.

It's only been three weeks but I've had a pretty positive response. I teamed up with a local non-profit group that's about to open their co-working space. Most of the people attending are really eager to learn about code and how to get started. So far I've been teaching the basics of HTML, CSS, and going over how the web works.

I'd say go for it! Create a meetup group on Meetup.com or start an event page on Facebook. It's daunting at first, but I'm sure there are tons of people near you that are interested. I'd say find a topic you enjoy and create a meetup group around that.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

How far from New York? Let me know if I can help or come speak or anything.

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chinjon profile image
Jonathan Chin

It's in Yonkers, so that actually just right outside of the city. Probably a 30-minute train ride on the Metro Noth. Here's the meetup page, it's pretty scarce right now but hopefully it'll grow.

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rapidnerd profile image
George

I currently volunteer in a large gaming community with a staff team that is about 250-300 of us all over the world. A lot of us tend to go to events all over the world for many different reasons, especially the insomnia gaming festival in Europe. I was nervous about meeting the staff and admin team for the first time, these are people I work with on a daily basis and me being a very awkward person in real I tend to be a little weird. Meeting the people I look up to on a daily basis for over 3 years now was amazing.

The meetups I tend to go to are primarily gaming but has a lot of developers there which I mostly attend for. The meetups I find are very interesting to meet the people that you work with, as well as meeting people from large companies such as corsair, razer, blizzard they were very nice people to meet, discussing development with some of them as well provided a lot of insight for me to what it's like to work in a large scaled company.

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Kim Arnett 

I started a meet up in my area because I noticed a gap in the market.

So far popular topics have been beginner workshops (getting started in technology x) and career coaching type sessions. More specifically we had a recruiter talk to us about resumes and a career coach talk to us about negotiation and interviews.

There are more specific meet ups out there that focus on one technology - and they'll have more advance topics about it.

It's really up to you as a meetup organizer the market you want to tap into. It helps setting up goals to begin with, or else it can be really over whelming. :)

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Ben Halpern

Meetups have been responsible for a lot of critical moments in my career as a software developer, be it a talk, or someone I met, etc.

The thing is, I often don't like meetups because I'm shy and introverted, but if I don't go to any, I miss out on the really great, important ones.