Mike Zornek

How to Run a Successful Book Club

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 12:21:13 -0500

I’ve been a member (and organizer) of many professional-oriented book clubs in my career. I find them a valuable way to connect with peers, keep up with my reading goals, discover new ideas, and learn from other points of view.

Running a book club can be a relatively low-cost and high-value experience. To help, I thought I’d document how I tend to prefer book clubs. These recommendations lean more towards work and professional book clubs and not the social and entertainment variety — though I’m sure some ideas translate.

Picking your books

If you want to get started, I’d recommend just picking a book you are interested in reading and forming a group around it. You might consider trying to assemble a group and letting them pick the first book, but I think it’s better to attract people with a specific title than a foggy concept.

As you finish a book, ask the group for next book suggestions and develop a prospect list. I recommend asking folks to submit a ranked vote against the prospect list (allowing people to vote with priorities), and then you, as the moderator, can choose a book using those signals. You might even consider non-books, like video courses, and work through the material as a cohort.

Aside: I actually built my own tool to run these ranked votes. You can use it too. It is free with no account creation necessary: RankedVote.app

Remember, you don’t need to pick the book that wins the vote. Sometimes, identifying a book that you identify will generate better discussions, benefit members who need help in that area, or draw more people to the club (introduction books tend to draw a bigger audience) might be a better choice for the group’s needs.

Scheduling and Group Size

Like early book choices, you should just pick a good time for you and get started. Be mindful of time zones if you want to attract people across continents. Also, avoid other meetup groups of the same topic that might overlap. I personally like weekly for work-related book clubs, but if the group is more casual, I think bi-weekly is fine, too. Eventually, as you start new books, you can revisit the schedule to accommodate better those who are showing up.

The ideal group size is probably 8 to 10 people (to ensure you have enough conversations), but you can get by with as few as 2-3 when getting started. Also, expect people to fall off during a book. It happens as people have other responsibilities and interests, and usually, this book club is rightfully a low priority. Don’t let it get you down. If they drop, wish them well and welcome them back when you start a new book. Don’t take it personally.

Venue and Video Tools

All the book clubs I’ve ever participated in or run have been online. For venue, I prefer Zoom for video quality consistency (and recording tools), but Discord is nice for having a place for people to chat between meeting times.

In recent book clubs, we’ve started recording the sessions. I make it clear that the meeting is being recorded and why. I also offered the attendees the option to request that parts be scrubbed if needed.

The main goal of the recordings is to help people who miss a week or two stay connected for an eventual return. We may also start to clip some of the conversations for social sharing and promotion, but it has not happened yet.

We publish the recordings inside our chat system and not on the public internet. I’m a little hesitant to post a full public recording as it will shape the discussion, and sometimes, people like to vent about their current work or past projects. Frankly, just having any recording will impact what people say, so you may choose not to do this to keep the floor more open—still figuring this out myself.

Running a Meeting

The format for most of my book clubs is an hour-long meeting. We try to rotate volunteers to summarize each chapter before opening the discussions. A typical meeting covers 2-3 chapters with 10-minute chapter summaries and 10-15 minutes of discussion per chapter. We do not enforce this schedule. If the room is having productive, even off-topic discussions, we let them play out. If I am summarizing a chapter and have a PDF version of the book, I often like to share my screen so they can see the page visuals and code snippets of interest.

I’ve heard of other groups that mix in a bit of out-of-meeting work. Something like a shared Google document where people are encouraged to capture their notes and thoughts outside the meeting so the meeting time can focus on the most valuable interactions. I even have a peer who was working on software that helps structure that kind of workflow, though I have not used it myself.

In general, a shared collaborative Google doc (or substitute) is valuable for any online meeting, in my experience.

Marketing and Promotion

I think it’s helpful to have a website presence to point to when promoting the book club. You don’t need much more than a single page sharing:

The goals of the club.
The current book.
When and where you meet, ideally with a calendar-friendly link.
Who to contact with questions.

Check out the Elixir Book Club page for a sample. GitHub and GitHub Pages are a great solution for this.

When it’s time to promote your club and/or a new book choice, I would promote it to the same circles in your community that share educational content and links. Think forums, Slacks, Discords, social media accounts, hash tags, etc.

Shared Responsibilities

In addition to volunteers doing chapter summaries, if you can find other ways to get other people involved in the management work of the book club, (eg: updating the website, editing the recording, etc) the chances for the book club to continue well into the future goes way up. Elixir Book Club has been going strong for years, even as different leadership has come and gone.

Those are my notes. I hope they inspire you to start or join a book club. If you have any thoughts or tips I missed, do consider shooting me an email. Thanks.

Elixir Book Club: Testing Elixir, Starts November 13th

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 11:48:17 -0400

I am pleased to share the reboot of the Elixir Book Club.

Starting Sunday, November 13th at 10:30am (Eastern Time), we’ll meet for an hour via Discord to talk about our next book…

Testing Elixir

Testing Elixir Book Cover

https://pragprog.com/titles/lmelixir/testing-elixir/

I read this back in April of 2021 and thought well of it. It’s a good overview of the various testing tools available and how to apply them to Elixir scenarios and patterns (OTP, Ecto, Phoenix).

During the first meeting will review chapters 1 and 2. After that, we will meet to review two or so more chapters every two weeks.

To participate, you’ll need to join the Elixir Book Club Discord, and shortly I expect the main book club website to be current with our new book and dates.

Extra Credit?

If you are interested in software testing, I HIGHLY recommend this other book as well: Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns.

Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns Book Cover

https://www.manning.com/books/unit-testing

Where Testing Elixir will help you learn the tooling and explain the how, Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns will help you discover the why and ultimately assist you in crafting a resilient testing strategy for your projects.

I read this book in June 2022, and it hugely influenced me and how I want to test moving forward. It could serve as a great companion or follow-up book for people in our club, though the club’s focus is officially and exclusively on Testing Elixir.

Hope to see you at the book club!

Finding Volunteers for Your Meetup Group

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 10:00:27 -0400

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

One of the biggest milestones of any meetup or community is when the group evolves beyond: “Mike’s group” to “our group”. (Substitute your own name for mine. 😀)

To achieve this, group responsibilities need to be spread out, and for that you need volunteers. Some organizers will experience friction getting people to volunteer their time for the group but in my own experience part of this friction is lack of specific details.

The easiest way to find volunteers for your meetup group is to ask for help. Be specific and define meaningful, approachable tasks that are easy for group regulars to take on. Find small tasks, with low commitment levels to help spur momentum.

Take for example, my own Philly Elixir group, which is a small local group. Recently, I found myself with a meeting agenda where I’d be doing the majority of the talks and demos. Not wanting to hear my own voice all night I tapped the shoulder of a meeting regular and asked if they could take on the industry news section of the agenda, highlighting some of the recent improvements to Elixir in version 1.11. It was a small task that helped take some of the pressure off my shoulders and ultimately strengthen the group health by having more people involved.

Beyond talks and event presentations there are lots of small tasks you can define and use to help draw out volunteerism within you group. Some examples:

Marketing outreach to other groups.
Social media posting.
Write post-meeting notes.
Picking up event food.
Help setup the room or AV needs.
Group photographer.
Website maintainer.

What are some other example of volunteerism can you think of? Let me know for a future post update.

Providing New Member Onboarding for Online Meetups During COVID

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 11:41:34 -0400

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

Even in the before times, being a new person at a meetup event was potentially an extremely overwhelming experience. Now that most group events and socializing are happening online it is even more important to make sure you as a group organizer have a plan for how to onboard new members and make them feel welcome.

Create and plan an onboarding experience for new members.

Each group will have its own unique needs but a common onboarding experience might include:

Schedule a one-on-one “virtual tour” by someone on the leadership team. While there are plenty of operational things to review during this meeting (how to join the chat rooms, rsvp for events, group expectations, culture and norms) I would encourage you to focus more on listening than talking during this meeting. Find out how the person learned about your group and what their short and long term goals are. Try to connect their goals to group activities. Be friendly, curious, and empathetic.

Connect the new member with a buddy or group sponsor. While this could be the same person who did the “virtual tour” it would be more optimal to connect the new member with a buddy or sponsor that best matches their goals. Maybe they are looking to get a new job, who among the current members can help them work on a resume or practice an interview? Maybe they want to get better at testing, who among the current members can help with that?

Schedule followup check-ins with the new member. Every so often, perhaps after the first 6 weeks and then maybe every 6 months, schedule a check-in and see how things are going. Have they attended any group events? How did these go? Are they socializing in the chat rooms? Try to find a way to get them involved. If they have not participated or stopped participating try to find out why. Make sure it’s clear you have their confidence, this is not a guilt trip and you are seeking honest feedback.

Make new members and guests feel welcome at events.

Walking into a video call as a new face, when the other members already know each other can be very intimidating. Here are a few things you can do as an event host to help make people feel more welcome.

Some people may feel more at ease observing events from a distance in the beginning, with their video and microphone off. If the event structure allows for this, then that behavior should acknowledged and accepted.

For those who do decide to be on video or microphone, make sure there is room in the agenda for personal introductions. Have a few ice breaker questions or ask people to share a recent win related to the topic of the event.

Create spaces for more happenstance connections.

Sometimes people benefit from a little nudge towards social interactions. When building out your group try to build spaces and opportunities for more chance encounters.

If you are on Slack, consider the donut meeting integration addon. “Donut introduces people who don’t know each other well on teams of all sizes via direct messages, and encourages them to meet in person or virtually for a variety of programs.”

Successful onboarding takes time but is worth the effort.

Your first step will be to draft an onboarding plan and share it with your group. Once everyone agrees, build out and automate your plan. Be sure to share these responsibilities with the other members and the leadership. The process will benefit greatly by being executed through a diverse collection of the membership.

If done well, proper onboarding will help new members feel connected faster and be more successful within your group.

If the onboarding fails, you’ll have an opportunity to learn how your group could improve to meet the needs of prospective members.

Goal-oriented Side Event Ideas for Technical Meetups

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 14:17:26 -0400

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

I’m a firm believer that going forward, successful technical meetup groups need to evolve past the once-a-month event style to more of an ongoing community presence, with smaller goal-oriented events happening more often. I believe it is through these events the social connections that ultimately lead to a successful community are solidified.

All of the following event ideas are built around:

Providing goal-based activities that will draw a crowd and encourage ad hoc socializing.
Offer more flexible or focused time commitments, with much of the event, when possible, happening async with high value face-to-face time limited for kickoffs and conclusion presentations.
Have low costs for organizing and hosting. No complicated software. No leaning on a single person to prepare a day long workshop.

Book Clubs

Book Clubs are great way to bring together goal minded people who want to become better at something. It’s a fairly well understood idea and so the big decisions are usually around what book to read and how to meet and discuss.

I recommend picking a few book options and letting a group vote. Generally speaking you’ll probably get more involvement with more introductory-level books.

You’ll want to meet once a week to keep that social pressure on people to do their readings and homework. Consider a first meeting for social introductions and then work out a regular meeting time from there. One hour is usually good enough.

When it comes to the meeting itself try to have different members volunteer to “drive” the meeting. My own book clubs tend to scan over the chapters from that week and kick off discussions/questions.

Code Jams

This is something I know of more formally from the Game Jam concept but it can just as easily apply to general programming.

Over the course of a single weekend or week you pick a theme and/or a specific SDK. People then work on a demo, game or hack with that theme and SDK in mind. At the end of the event people present their work, with awards being handed out – the more cheesy the trophies the more sought after they are within a community.

Some personal code jam style events I have fond memories of include MacHack, Iron Coder and Global Game Jam.

Architecture Craft Sessions

While Code Jams are more on the lighthearted side, these Architecture Craft Sessions are more about education through practice and peer review.

Pick a simple app idea (eg: tasks list, weather app, whatever). Everyone does a rough prototype or architecture outline for how they would build it out: the objects and types they would define, how they would interact, and why they are making these decisions. Something akin to an architecture decision record (ADR).

The event style would be advance notice of the app idea, then before the meeting each person would work on their prototype or outline in their own time. At the meeting they would come together to present what they’ve come up with. People can ask questions and offer feedback on the designs. It can take time to do a full code walk through so you might have to break up a larger group into smaller breakout groups to do this in a set amount of time.

The big idea is people get more experience with how to break down problems and design architectures that are SOLID and testable.

Pair Programming on Code Katas

I define the Architecture Craft Sessions above as more solo work and while some people prefer to build in isolation, there is also a lot to be said for pairing two people together. In particular pairing a junior person with someone more senior, even for an hour can lead to a ton of great observations for how people work.

To help define a path for this pairing we look to Code Katas.

A kata, or code kata, is defined as an exercise in programming which helps hone your skills through practice and repetition. Kata exercises vary from general to more complex algorithms and real life situations for you to try using your preferred programming language.

Remember that code katas are not quizzes or puzzles. You should not only try to ‘solve’ it, but find a very good solution, following best practices of the programming language you are using.

For more examples on Code Kata problems you can use check out:

https://github.com/gamontal/awesome-katas

Open Source Project Day

Rather than kick off a major new group open source project (which has a much larger time and energy commitment), pick a day and an existing open source project for your platform.

Kick off the day with an introduction to the open source project, it’s code and some good tasks for new contributors (simple bugs, documentations, more tests). Let people work async or in pairs, with shared group spaces for discussion or questions. At the end of the day people can demo the PRs they’ve built.

For people new to open source, match up mentors to teach how open source and pull requests work.

Any other ideas?

Those are few ideas from my own experiences. I’d love to hear if you have any more for a future update to this post.

Thanks, and best of luck with your technical meetup.

Evolve or Die: It's Time to Rethink Meetup Groups

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 30 Aug 2020 14:10:57 -0400

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

Discussion topics from the video:

My ongoing research into meetup groups. Still looking for more people to interview too!
Technical meetups are on the decline. Why?
- Part of it is the avalanche of technical information online.
- Part of it is people being able to more easily find and connect with same minded people online.
- COVID has only expedited this decline.

If your meetup group is limited to meeting once a month, at a building, to eat pizza and talk about a technology, I fear your group may not be around in 5 more years.

There are still a ton of great benefits from a running a meetup community.
How should meetups evolve?
- More events, smaller events.
- Some in-person, some online.
- Not every member will attend every event.
- Social events: hack nights, side project saturday, show and tell.
- Goal-oriented events: book clubs, workshops, mentoring, masterminds, side project time bartering.
- Passive connections: Chatting and DM via Slack or Discord. Group Twitter account to promote member successes.
- Maybe do bigger events every 6-months? formal dinners, picnics, mixers?
- Need to spend more time onboarding new members when the group lives online.

The Google Trend chart for “meetup”.

Thanks for watching and best of luck with your group.

Android Book Club Update

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 09:22:55 -0400

A few updates on our Android Book Club. (Original announcement post.)

Things are going well.
Will be migrating from Programming Kotlin to Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (4th Edition) in the coming weeks.
We have room for a few more people, if you want to join us!

Android Book Club Website / Membership Application:

link-removed

Actionable Ideas How Meetups Can Evolve When Forced Online Only

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 09:40:09 -0400

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

Today I recorded some thoughts regarding the challenges meetups are facing as they’ve been forced online and ideas how those challenges can be met.

Your browser does not seem to support the video format. You can download the MP4 file directly.

Download MP4 Watch on YouTube

A quick summery:

Challenge: Group participation is down.
- Idea: Embrace the smaller numbers; do things that you could not do with a larger crowd.
- Idea: Set expectations about required interactions; let people be passive when they want to.
- Idea: Do more, smaller, focused events instead of one big meeting a month.
- Idea: Create spaces for socializing outside events.
- Idea: Help connect people outside your group structure. Make it easy for members to discover each other on social or their personal website.
Challenge: Hard to attract and retain new members.
- Idea: Make sure events are structured to help new people get familiar with the community (introductions, one-on-one help, etc.).
- Idea: Create a chain of events structured around a goal, like a book club or group project.

In some ways, it’s a great time to start a meetup:

No more venue and food costs.
Can promote and bring in people from outside your city.
People are out of work and looking to improve themselves, give them a path to do so.

If you want to chat about your own group, I’d love to hear how things are going. See this post for more detail:

Help Me with an Introduction to Your Meetup Organizer

Thanks again, and good luck with your group!

Help Me with an Introduction to Your Meetup Organizer

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 11:01:35 -0400

It’s an open secret that I’ve been working on some new software to help meetups, specifically with an early focus towards technical meetups.

While the foundation is coming together, there are still a ton of open questions and I’m trying to schedule some more customer research phone calls with other meetup organizers.

To be clear, I’m not selling anything, just asking a handful of questions helping me:

understand why they run their group
find out how it’s going historically and during COVID
learn what tools are working well and what tools are not

The call lasts about 30 minutes.

Schedule a 30 minute video chat!

If you are part of a technical meetup, please do me a favor and make an introduction to your group leadership. It would be extremely helpful to me. Here is a draft email you can start with:

Hi NAME.

I saw this blog post asking for help making introductions to
other technical meetup organizers. I follow the guy on
social media. He is doing research for some meetup related
software and I wanted to help him out with an introduction.
He assures me it's not a sales call, just a few questions
about our group. If you want to reach out or learn more info
check out:

http://mikezornek.com/posts/2020/8/introduction/

Schedule a video chat (30m):

https://savvycal.com/zorn/chat

Thanks.

Kotlin Tools for Android Book Club

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sat, 04 Jul 2020 11:32:28 -0400

A quick tour of some of the tools you’ll want to use to help learn Kotlin.

Links

Finding Speakers to Present at Your Event

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 09:00:00 -0400

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

Helping to organize a meetup group can be extremely rewarding. I’ve been running various groups for over 10 years now and I only regret not getting starting sooner. Still, there is not much to love in the minutia of monthly tasks to keep everything going.

One of the most anxious tasks you’ll face is, how do you find speakers for the next event? This can be particularly stressful since it’s something that you can’t accomplish completely by yourself and getting commitment on something from another person is always a little bit harder. Here are a few ideas to help you keep your stress low and your speaker confirmations flowing.

Reach out to Group Regulars

The first source of speakers is usually the group itself. If you are keeping connected with your members as recommended in How to Brainstorm Presentation Topics for Your Events, you should be aware of what people are working on and if it would be a good match for a presentation. Do not wait for people to come to you, you need to reach out to them, and repetitively. Do it so much so as to be comical about it.

Explain the Benefits

Public speaking and selling one’s ideas is a priceless skill that comes into play for almost all careers. Speaking at a local group is great practice for people who are new to speaking or who want to try out a potential conference talk in front of real people.

Host Multiple Talks Formats

One idea that can help attract even the more shy potential speaker is to lower the barrier to entry. In addition to full 30-60 minute talks why not accept shorter 5-10 minute lightning talks or even more simple project show and tells. Having these smaller presentations can help ease the stress of presenting for someone new.

Offer to Help Them

I highly recommend speakers practice their talk before presenting to a group. It can really help to also record this practice. As they go back and watch the recording they’ll usually find lots things that can be improved. If the recording is made in advance enough you as the group organizer can also offer to watch it and provide feedback.

Recruit Speakers Who Have Presented at Recent Events or Conferences

If someone has done a presentation once, it’s usually much easier to present it a second time. Take advantage of this and browse other meetups or conferences in your area or even outside of your area (since many meetups are virtual these days) and ask recent presenters if they might be interested in doing a presentation for your group.

In addition to using social channels to help spread the word about the speaker openings it’s also a great subtext for reminding people of the group existence (so they may attend) as well as your efforts into helping to run the group.

Reach Out Months in Advance

It’s much easier to get someone to agree to do a talk in three months away than three weeks away. Once they are signed up, most people benefit from the friendly social guilt of doing the talk. We all need a little push sometimes.

When They Say Yes…

If someone shows interest in speaking, have them fill out a form to get the conversation started. I’ve included some recommended questions you might want to use as a starting point.

Sample Speaker Submission Form Questions

Full Name
Email
Phone (for emergencies)
Presentation Title
Presentation Summary
A Short Personal Bio
Expected Length
At what upcoming group event would you like to present?
Have you ever given this talk before?
Has this talk (or others) ever been published online? Please provide URLs.

Being the Backup, Doing a Talk Yourself

No doubt, particularly in the beginning of a groups existence, you might have to do a few talks yourself. You want to limit this and get others involved ASAP but I would much rather favor you doing a talk than to cancel a monthly event. Consistency is extremely important to the heartbeat of a group.

An Android Book Club for iOS Developers

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 10:03:23 -0400

I’m starting a new book club that will teach Android development using Kotlin for current iOS developers. Details below.

This is a book club dedicated to learning Kotlin and Android application development. Specifically, I am hoping to attract current iOS developers who are looking to expand their knowledge and use their current experiences with Swift and iOS to help shape the conversations at the weekly meetings. That said, previous Swift and iOS experience is not required, but just expect some comparisons to come up.

About the Host

My name is Mike Zornek and I am from from Philadelphia, PA. I am the developer behind the Guildflow website that hosts this book club and am selfishly using this book club in part to help test it out.

I am a long time Mac and iOS developer. I am interested in learning Kotlin and Android so I can help build a companion app for Guildflow. I am also interested in being more familiar with Kotlin and Android as I often work on consulting projects that develop both iOS and Android versions.

The Books

This book club will happen in two part. The first part will be about 6-8 weeks and focus on the Kotlin language itself and use the book Programming Kotlin by Venkat Subramaniam along with coding challenges from the Exercism Kotlin track. The second part of the book club will be closer to 12 weeks long and focus on Android application development and will use the book Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (4th Edition). Note the 4th edition, as it was updated to use Kotlin.

Details

The meetings will happen every Monday at 8pm-9pm (Eastern Time) and happen through a video chat using Whereby.

We’ll also provide a Slack chat room for in-between meeting discussions to be shared later.

To join the group use the Membership Application:

link-removed

Once you are accepted into the group you can RSVP for events as well as view the membership list and other members-only details.

Questions / Feedback?

Send email to: mike@mikezornek.com.

Book Club Website: link-removed

How to Brainstorm Presentation Topics for Your Events

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 10:00:00 -0400

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

In my experience running meetup groups for over a decade, the social aspect or hallway conversations can sometimes be the most beneficial aspects of an event yet to hold an event without a speaker or topic can usually lead to an empty RSVP list.

Keeping on top of what your members are interested in hearing more about is an important group organizer task and in this post I’ll share some ways in which you can stay informed.

Keep Connected With Your Group Regulars

Every month send out a few personal emails to a few of your group regulars. Ask them how things are going, if they are enjoying the group, what they have worked on recently and what they are interested in learning. Record their comments in an ongoing notes file or spreadsheet.

Aside: While I recommend keeping a monthly checklist of things to do (including things like the above) I would also advise against automating these emails. Make each one personal and you’re far more likely to get a conversation going.

You can also send our a web survey every 6-9 months. This is a little more impersonal but can still generate some helpful information.

Don’t Be Afraid to Mix In Beginner Topics

Many of the technical groups I’ve run in the past are almost 50% hobbyists or people just starting out. Don’t be afraid to revisit the basics from time to time to help these beginners out. I would also argue many of the experienced people can usually learn something new from these beginner presentations and discussions.

Run a Group Roundtable Discussion

Every industry has their regular issues, from pricing to customer support. Consider hosting a roundtable discussion about a specific topic. Be ready to seed the conversation with open questions. You could also show a recent industry conference video to perk people’s curiosity.

Spy on Other Groups

Spy is a little sharp of a term, but you get the idea. Stay in touch with your fellow organizers in other cities. Ask them what kind of presentations they’ve recently run and how they were received. If they are not too far you might even be able to woo a prospective speaker to visit your own town.

Share your notes publicly with your group using a collaborative tool like Trello or even a simple Google Sheets. Letting them see what’s planned and what’s open can help spur involvement.

Video: Nurturing Your Community During Lock Down (7m)

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 14:50:16 -0400

My Project: Club House Hosting

Meetup Finds New Owners and I Welcome the Competition

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 18:11:15 -0400

For a long time I’ve felt Meetup’s service offerings were pretty mediocre and stale. In 2017 they were purchased by WeWork and things only got worse.

I’ve been a long time group organizer and feel very connected to the needs of the community, so much so that I’ve started working on a Meetup competitor called Club House Hosting.

Club House Hosting enables you to create a group website with modern event and membership tools for your social or peer group. Honoring the ethos of the IndieWeb, Club House Hosting lets you use your own domain, own your data and control your privacy.

Meetup, as of today, still does really share these goals but there is some positive news:

Today we’re announcing that Meetup has fully divested from WeWork and has been acquired by an investment group formed for the express purpose of acquiring Meetup. Our new partners believe in our mission, in our organizers, in the power of real human connections (in-person and online when necessary), and they’re investing in Meetup’s future success.

Even though I consider us competitors I’m thrilled Meetup is out of the shadow of WeWork. I hope the change infuses them with some productive energy.

As for Club House Hosting, things have been slow so far in 2020 but with more time available on the horizon I hope to launch a public alpha so people can start kicking tires soon™. Stay tuned.

Philly Elixir Meetup is Rebooting

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0500

After too long of a hiatus, the Philly Elixir Meetup group is rebooting!

https://www.meetup.com/PhillyElixir

Elixir is a functional programming language that is popular for building web apps and services using a library called Phoenix as well as GraphQL APIs using Absinthe.

Our first meeting back will be:

Monday, May 6, 2019
6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

PromptWorks
1211 Chestnut Street #400

RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/PhillyElixir

Even if you can’t make this first meeting, please join the group as we’ll have many more to come. If you have questions, shoot me an email. Thanks!

New Project: Group Leadership Club

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 21:19:13 -0500

Today I’d like to share a new project I’ve been working on called Group Leadership Club, Helping People Build Successful Technical Meetups.

This site is dedicated to group leaders. Our goal is to help them start, run and sustain their own meetup groups. Through articles and a community forum we work to answer questions and provide guidance.

I’m a huge believer in the power of meetup groups. I’ve participated in many groups over the years and have myself helped run a very successful group in Philly CocoaHeads. Through CocoaHeads I’ve met dozens of people I now consider close friends and peers not to mention the education opportunities.

Over the past few years I’ve tried to give back to the community, specifically to other leaders, from causal conversations and advice to a formal talk I did at 360iDev. This new site is an extension of those recommendations with a modern discussion forum to help address specific questions as they pop up.

If you think the content is relative, please sign up to the forum or subscribe to the RSS feed. If you know someone who might like such a site, please do share a link. Thanks for your help.

Network Design Talk at Philly CocoaHeads

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 10:25:00 -0500

I’m going to be giving a talk at the local CocoaHeads next week. If you are in Philly area you should stop by.

Thursday, January 10, 2019
6:30 PM to 9:00 PM
IndyHall
399 Market Street, Suite 360
Meetup RSVP

Designing a Modern Swift Network Stack

When an app is young and has simple networking needs it’s not uncommon to use URLSession tasks directly inside of a view controller. However as the app needs grow to include things like authenticated requests, token renewal, testing, cancelation, caching and more – you’ll want to have a more defined networking stack to lean on. On a client project over the summer, the iOS team and I started to document a networking wish list and over the past few months we’ve started to execute it, first on some smaller features and then a demos app. Now we are preparing for a new greenfield iOS app where we should be able to hit the ground running with our new ideas.

In this talk I’ll review the network design we’ve come up with. I’ll demo what we have working and talk about how we want to extend it in the future. Attendee should walk away with new ideas that they can integrate into their own networking stacks.

I think it will go well and hopefull kickstart some good conversations.

Meetup.com Survey Links

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 17:06:54 +0000

Someone has breached Meetup.com security and been sending out links to some sketchy surveys.

I saw some more yesterday so I figured I’d post a warning.

Meetup.com seems to be aware of it (as the messages are being deleted) but alas when I asked support I got no response and I see no mention of the security breach on their site.

If you see these, do not click on the links.

UPDATE

Meetup’s Response:

Marianka (Meetup)

Dec 8, 4:14 PM EST

Hi Mike,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Please know that those messages were not posted by Meetup HQ.

We take reports of fake accounts very seriously, and we’re working as a team to be more proactive in our rooting out of profiles like the one in your report and to grow our resources for members to flag them. Reports like yours help us fine tune our processes and improve our tools. Should you see anything like this going forward, please exercise caution and be sure to report the matter to us. In the future, please make sure you contact us directly from the email address associated with your Meetup account.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Mike.

All the best.

Sincerely,
Marianka
Integrity Specialist

Philly Blockchain Tech Meetup

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 14:41:47 +0000

Local geek friend Ben DiFrancesco is starting up a new meetup called Philly Blockchain Tech:

Don’t miss the first ever meeting of Philly Blockchain Tech! Special thanks to our gracious hosts, Elsevier, for providing the space, food, and beverages!

Pizza and drinks will be served at 6:00 PM. At roughly 6:30, we’ll hear two brief talks from our organizers. In addition to introducing the group, sponsors, and thoughts for the future, Ben will discuss “Why Technologists and Entrepreneurs Should be Excited About Blockchain” and Ryan will present “A Look at the Cryptocurrency Landscape” from a developer’s point of view.

After the talks, we’ll leave time for open discussion about the meetup. We want to hear from you about how you’d like to see this meetup evolve and what you’re hoping to get from it! Any remaining time will be for socializing and open conversation.

Please share this event with anyone you know who might find this interesting! While we hope to focus on technology and entrepreneurship, we welcome people with all experience levels and professional backgrounds!

RSVP if you plan to attend!

How We Record Talks at Philly CocoaHeads

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 22:44:52 +0000

I came across this post from Rico Jones on how he records the Portland Ruby Brigade’s monthly meetings and thought I’d do something similar for how we record the Philly CocoaHead presentations.

Why Only Main Talks

This first thing I’ll note is we do not record the entire meeting. Early on this was to due to the experimental nature of our recording setup but more recently, at a leadership meeting, we made the call to continue to only record our “main talks”. We do this for a few reasons:

Not recording the “show and tell” talks lets those be a little bit more free-form, with less pressure on the presenters (which is a big reason why they are in the agenda).
Many of the show and tells are in-progress app demos, and so there is benefit to keeping them non-public.
We expect a higher level of preparedness for the main talks, and to ask for people to put that much time into a talk, it would seem wrong not to capture it.
If the whole meeting were being captured / broadcast it would encourage people not to come.

The Setup

Starting from the presenter’s laptop we provide an HDMI cable. If they want to present or demo from an iOS device we have an HDMI to Lightning adaptor.

The HDMI cable then feeds into our capture device, an Elgato Game Capture HD. This device is targeted at the streaming game market but is just as viable to capture normal HDMI signals. The device itself is an HDMI passthrough with no frame drops or anything. The device is even powered through the USB cable so no need for a power cord. The video / audio is then compress into mp4 (on device using hardware encoding). The compressed signal is sent to a Macintosh running some custom Elgato software. I use an older Macbook Air to act as our dedicated capture computer. While there are many other features for dedicated streamers, we simply press record.

We then take the other end of the HDMI cable and route it to our projection system. Now the Apple Store that hosts us has a very impressive setup but sadly it’s not as easy as it should be. They have an HDMI connection, and while it works for the Apple TV it doesn’t register when we plug it into a Mac. To get around this we used to use an HDMI to DVI adaptor and the alternate DVI input. It worked fine but doing it this way lost the audio. Recently we’ve fixed this by buying a converter box that splits the HDMI into both DVI and an audio jack. Again, the Apple Store does have a in-house roof speaker system but for us sadly it’s been down. In the interim we’ve been getting by with a Beats Pill Speaker the Apple Store is nice enough to provide.

While not part of the capture, I will give a friendly nod to Fin, an iOS performance timer we run on an iPad mini to help the speakers know how much time they have left. Works great.

I’ll also recommend the presenter remote I use. It’s a Kensington, with a nice simple to use USB dongle that slips into the remote when not in use. It has a laser pointer too but I can’t say I use it much. Battery life has been very good for this device.

So that captures the video and audio from the presenter’s laptop or device but what about the speaker’s voice? For that we use a lapel clip on mic and Digital Audio Recorder. The recorder can work without the mic if you are looking to capture a room discussion but for 1 person, adding the mic is a real quality difference.

After the meeting we combine the video and audio captures using ScreenFlow. Editing is fairly simple for most cases, usually as simple matching up the action and adjusting some audio. The finished product is exported and then uploaded to Vimeo Pro, which acts as our library of sorts. (We pay for Vimeo Pro to keep ads out and to make sure we have API access.) People can watch the talks through Vimeo itself or our new Apple TV app, “PhillyCocoaHeadsTV” (search for “CocoaHeads” on the TV).

Future Improvements

Overall I’m pretty happy with the current setup but I do have some ideas:

It would be nice if we could get the Apple HDMI connection to work, that would simply our wires a bit.
At work we use a Catchbox to help capture Q and A. It would be nice to work out something similar for us.
While it might save a bit of editing time to convert to a wireless mic, it’s pretty low on my list. Would have to improve some other aspect to make it more worth while.
There is a lot of equipment to carry in, setup and carry out. It’s very reliant on me personally at the moment. I’ll probably be missing a meeting or two this year so I hope to train someone else to run this while I’m gone.

Hope you enjoyed my rundown. If you help capture stuff like this and have any tips or tricks, let me know. Thanks.

Philly CocoaHeads: History

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 21:53:29 +0000

Being the lead organizer of the Philly chapter of CocoaHeads, I always welcome the opportunity to chat with members of other meetups. It’s great to compare notes on how we run our groups, what’s worked and what’s failed. In particular I’ve recently chatted with the leadership of the Nashville CocoaHeads and was also able to attend an Atlanta CocoaHeads meeting while visiting Big Nerd Ranch. It was a great experience and has me inspired to capture some of my thoughts here on the blog. This first article is a walk down memory lane to document the history of Philly CocoaHeads.

Getting Started

The Philly chapter of CocoaHeads started out of IndyHall in 2008. IndyHall is a coworking space, a place for people who can work from home but choose not to; perhaps because they want a work/home separation or just to participate in the greater creative community. Back then IndyHall was still fairly young but had attracted together a strong tech following including:

Andy Mroczkowski and Far McKon who were working for the local company Neat, and their Mac software / scanner combo.
Jason Allum who was working on RipIt (which would later be sold to The Little App Factory).
Dave Martorana who had a few apps, including MultiFirefox and Multiplex (a media server app ahead of its time).
Joah Aas, who worked for the Mozilla organization and is now most known for his help with the Let’s Encrypt project.
Randy Zauhar, a local professor teaching Bioinformatics and Chemistry at University of Sciences. Randy had previous help run and host a group called: PHAD, Philadelphia Apple Developers.
And myself. I was a basic IndyHall member and was working on ProfitTrain updates at the time.

Philadelphia Apple Developers (PHAD) never grew to be anything very large but I remember it fondly. It would usually be about 4-6 of us sharing a pizza and showing each other our Cocoa projects. I vividly remember Randy showing off his spreadsheet app which listed chemical equations on one side and then had an OpenGL cell rendering the compositions on the other. I also remember doing talks on Subversion and then Core Data. Again, they were small meetings but having even a few people who were interested in or working in Cocoa back then to bounce ideas off was a huge win.

The early meetings of our group were ran by Andy Mroczkowski and actually marketed under the name PhillyCocoa and not CocoaHeads. The meetings were very demo heavy with lots of roundtable questions and discussions filling in the cracks. Some members took to working on a side project, a calculator, outside of the meeting. The project didn’t get too far but the remanence of it have been preserved on GitHub.

This is a photo of IndyHall, Strawberry Street Edition. The first “CocoaHeads” meeting was held in that back meeting hut.

As the iOS SDK (or iPhone SDK as it was called back then) was announced there was a serge in new members and interest in the group. The biggest hurdle seemed to be Objective-C itself so we planned and ran a workshop.

Over two Saturdays, mixing lecture time and coding exercises from Learn Objective-C on the Mac, by Mark Dalrymple, Scott Knaster we got 12 or so people a head start on iPhone programming.

New Leadership

Meetings continued, now at IndyHall’s new home on 3rd Street (or N3RD Street as it would come to be known as). Eventually a December meeting was announced and Andy let it be know that if you were interested in the future of PhillyCocoa to attend. At the meeting Andy announced his upcoming departure to head to San Fransisco to be apart of a startup. Two volunteers came forward to help organize the group in his stead, myself and Mike Deaven.

Meeting Format Changes

Over the next year me and Mike enacted a handful of changes we’d hope improve the group.

One immediate change we did was move the website to WordPress. Previously Andy had a custom Ruby CMS / publish thing going and it wasn’t easily portable. I was able to get all of the old post converted into WordPress. The main goal here being enable multiple people to post and not have the code be machine dependent.

Another change was subtle, but I started to embrace the CocoaHeads brand in our naming and introductions. I always was aware of them and to me it seemed helpful to take the name and have our chapter listed on the main global site.

We also started to fiddle with the meeting format itself. Moving the pizza / social time to the front end of the meeting. This helped since we usually had a lot of stragglers arrive between 6:30 and 7:00, so by having the pizza upfront we could make sure to start the meeting with everyone present.

I also started to be a little more rigid in the introductions, making sure to repeat the basics of the group, who we were, what we did, when we met. I wanted new people to quickly get a sense of expectations.

The hardest thing back then was getting people to do talks. There were many meetings in the early days where we did not have a formal speaker and so it was on my shoulders to build a presentation to keep the group entertained. It was a lot of work but I think a major reason why we were later became more successful. I think it’s incredibly important to be consistent, to have that meeting every 2nd Thursday no matter what. Setting up that pattern and not giving into canceling meetings really helped solidify the group.

To help spur talks we started to request smaller commitments, show and tell time. A short talk or demo usually 5-15m in length. Much less to prepare and much less anxiety. It started slow but eventually kicked off a pattern of people coming forward to do talks, even “main” talks.

Adding Members through Meetup.com

Up to this point Philly CocoaHeads did not promote itself too much. You heard about it through word of mouth or via IndyHall announcements. Looking to grow the community we decided to join Meetup.com for more exposure. It took a few months to get going but eventually started to bring in tons of new faces. Meetings quickly grew from about 10-12 people, closer to 20-25.

As of today we have about 870 registered members on Meetup.com. Now most of them are not active members. I’d guess if you defined “active” as participated in a group event sometime in the last 12 months, you’d probably end up with ~200 members.

Alfie joins us from NY via a Double.

New Events and Expanding the Leadership

When iOS 7 was announced we decided to do a special hack day to celebrate. We sold tickets to help buy a nice catered lunch and gathered at IndyHall on Saturday to hack on new iOS 7 APIs. The event was a huge success.

One newer member wanted to help do this more often and so Tom Piarulli joined the leadership to help run what has now become known as Side Project Saturday. SPS is typically the last Saturday of the month, starting at 10am and running until about 5pm. People come and go, work on their side projects, ask questions and otherwise socialize with their fellow geeks.

At around the same time the leadership also welcomed Kotaro Fujita to help run our website and Twitter account.

Moving to the Apple Store

We are fortunate enough to have a very nice Apple Store here in Philadelphia. Sometime in 2013 I was approached by the business relations manager from the store. He came to a few meetings and introduced himself. He was really impressed with our group and offered to help us out and possibly host the meeting.

I was kind of torn. We had our start at IndyHall and while we were definitely starting to outgrow the space I didn’t want to leave. Me and Kotaro took a trip to the Apple Store to checkout the Briefing Room. The room is incredibly nice. It’s on the second floor of the store, not open to the public. It’s kind of a VIP area for larger demos and meetings. It had 5 mounted TVs, all wired up for AirPlay and sound. A huge wood table with 16 swivel chairs but plenty of space around the edges for fold up chairs. Fully laid out we could host 40-45 people and have a great AV setup to help support the speakers.

We made the move in November 2013 and it’s worked out great. The space is extremely accommodating and many of the members certainly enjoy the prestige of getting to meet in such a private venue.

Workshops, Suburb Side Project Saturdays, and CocoaLove

In 2014, Curtis Herbert who had already been very active in the community as well as doing some talks for us joined the leadership team and started multiple new projects.

Firstly was CocoaLove, which started out best as I can recall as friendly outburst during my “Industry News” section while reviewing upcoming conferences. “Why don’t we have any conferences here in Philly?” — and so it began. CocoaLove is not an official child of CocoaHeads but we obviously share a lot of the same goals.

Curtis also helped spur new educational events we came to call Workshops. Typically one day, 5 hour events with paid for tickets (most money going to the speaker to help compensate them for prep time). We ran about six or so over the last year and a half, covering introductions to Objective-C and then later Swift, App Marketing, UX design, and more. Workshops are incredibly loved by our members and sell out quickly. The hardest part about running them is the custom content creation. We have some ideas on how to improve that moving forward and hope to offer more Workshops in the year ahead so stay tuned.

And finally we have our “Suburb” edition of Side Project Saturday. The city of Philadelphia is very flat and wide, with an extended suburban layout. We have many members who live outside the city and can not always participate with our center city events. To help, we started running a “Suburb” edition of our Side Project Saturday event. These are held at the Apple Store in King of Prussia. We’ve been able to host a few and hope to do more. Again, Curtis has been very helpful in organizing this.

Videos

In 2015 we continued to evolve and expand what we offer, this time with recordings. We’ve been talking about recordings for awhile but in 2015 things started to fall into place. I’ll go into detail as to how we record in a future blog post, but put simply it’s capturing what video we pipe to the monitors and then using a lapel microphone for the speaker to capture their voice. After the meeting we match the two together and then publish to Vimeo. During the fall we also added a custom AppleTV app which streams the content as well (search for “CocoaHeads” and you’ll find it).

Book Club

Another new endeavor for 2015 was the Book Club. We started it over the summer reading through Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X and then restarted it this winter with HackingWithSwift.com. Book Club basically has members work through chapters and then meet online to discuss how it went. Over the summer we met every other week, while the winter edition has been more aggressive doing it every Monday. A big thanks to Michael Mayer for helping to run the latest Book Club season.

The Future

So it’s 2016 and things continue to look good. I’d say the biggest problem we have is that we occasionally max out of room occupancy at the Apple Store but not enough to really justify a new venue. We also recognize our website could use a lot of work to meet our high standards but it remains a fairly low priority overall.

As the main organizer I’m extremely lucky to have such great support from the members and the rest of the leadership. There is no way we could do this much work if it wasn’t for the many volunteers we have. I’m extremely proud of the community we’ve made and continue to run.

Recommendations

To those running similar meet ups a few closing recommendations:

Be consistent with meeting dates and locations.
Be willing to do a lot of personal presentations and/or MC of roundtables when other speakers are not available in the early days.
Don’t be afraid to shake people down for talks. Also remember it’s much easier to get them to sign up for a talk a few months from now than in a few weeks. Take advantage of that.
If meeting after work try to have some food and drink available. We do pizza cause it’s relatively cheap and easy. You want to feed them but remember they aren’t coming for the food. In the early days a donation jar can usually cover most of the costs, later you might need sponsorship. I’ll have more to say on that in the future.
Help spread the responsibilities. Even smaller things like handing the food, taking meeting notes or running the group Twitter helps turn “the group” into “our group”.
Have fun.

Philly CocoaHeads Website Relaunch Project

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 22 Feb 2015 23:37:27 +0000

I haven’t had an active side project in the last few months. When asked I would tell people looking for a new job was my side project. Now that I have that new job search (and my Girl Develop It class behind me it’s time to kick something off; we’re going to rebuild the Philly CocoaHeads website!

When I took over the local chapter of CocoaHeads here in Philly (back in 2010 or so) the previous organizer had a Ruby/Markdown publish system setup. It was kind of neat but involved a lot of setup on the client box to get up and running. I had a few people posting to the site so rather than set up that system on each individual’s box I opted for WordPress. The WordPress site has done ok for us but we’ve been growing a ton and doing a lot more over the last year (workshops, video capture of meeting presentations). I’d love to start to centralize things like keeping track of our members and our money, overall there is a ton that could be automated and it’s time to make it happen.

I don’t want to do this alone and I also would love to start documenting the project as it unfolds. To get started we have a brainstorm session scheduled during Side Project Saturday. If you want to participate please consider stopping by. If you can’t stop by, but want to participate, let me know and maybe we can setup a Google Hangout call-in option. To capture notes I’m going to use Trello. The board is live and open to the public. (You will need to login with a Trello account to edit.) Feel free to start to document your ideas today.

Philly Craftsmanship

mike@mikezornek.com (Mike Zornek) — Sun, 03 Aug 2014 00:52:02 +0000

Software as Craft Philadelphia

A community of professionals dedicated to well-crafted software

Was very happy to attend the inaugural meeting of this group last week. Was a great mix of discussion and hands-on coding/pairing. Thanks to Promptworks for hosting.

During the discussions, the Software Craftsmanship North America conference (as well as its manifesto) were mentioned. You can find a bunch of the conference videos on the eighthlight vimeo channel. Seems like pretty interesting stuff.

In related news (since I think all hosts were in attendance at said meeting), I want to give a plug to the podcast Turing-Incomplete podcast. Finally starting to catch up on this Philly showcase of talent and really enjoying the discussions. Keep up the good work!

Mike Zornek

How to Run a Successful Book Club

Picking your books

Scheduling and Group Size

Venue and Video Tools

Running a Meeting

Marketing and Promotion

Shared Responsibilities

Elixir Book Club: Testing Elixir, Starts November 13th

Testing Elixir

Extra Credit?

Finding Volunteers for Your Meetup Group

The easiest way to find volunteers for your meetup group is to ask for help. Be specific and define meaningful, approachable tasks that are easy for group regulars to take on. Find small tasks, with low commitment levels to help spur momentum.

Providing New Member Onboarding for Online Meetups During COVID

Create and plan an onboarding experience for new members.

Make new members and guests feel welcome at events.

Create spaces for more happenstance connections.

Successful onboarding takes time but is worth the effort.

Goal-oriented Side Event Ideas for Technical Meetups

Book Clubs

Code Jams

Architecture Craft Sessions

Pair Programming on Code Katas

Open Source Project Day

Any other ideas?

Evolve or Die: It's Time to Rethink Meetup Groups

Android Book Club Update

Actionable Ideas How Meetups Can Evolve When Forced Online Only

Help Me with an Introduction to Your Meetup Organizer

Schedule a 30 minute video chat!

Kotlin Tools for Android Book Club

Finding Speakers to Present at Your Event

Reach out to Group Regulars

Explain the Benefits

Host Multiple Talks Formats

Offer to Help Them

Recruit Speakers Who Have Presented at Recent Events or Conferences

Post Speaker Openings on Your Social Media Accounts and Blogs

Reach Out Months in Advance

When They Say Yes…

Sample Speaker Submission Form Questions

Being the Backup, Doing a Talk Yourself

An Android Book Club for iOS Developers

About the Host

The Books

Details

How to Sign Up

Questions / Feedback?

How to Brainstorm Presentation Topics for Your Events

Keep Connected With Your Group Regulars

Don’t Be Afraid to Mix In Beginner Topics

Run a Group Roundtable Discussion

Spy on Other Groups

Track and Share Your Plans

Video: Nurturing Your Community During Lock Down (7m)

Meetup Finds New Owners and I Welcome the Competition

Philly Elixir Meetup is Rebooting

New Project: Group Leadership Club

Network Design Talk at Philly CocoaHeads

Designing a Modern Swift Network Stack

Meetup.com Survey Links

Philly Blockchain Tech Meetup

How We Record Talks at Philly CocoaHeads

Why Only Main Talks

The Setup

Future Improvements

Philly CocoaHeads: History

Getting Started

New Leadership

Meeting Format Changes

Adding Members through Meetup.com

New Events and Expanding the Leadership

Moving to the Apple Store

Workshops, Suburb Side Project Saturdays, and CocoaLove

Videos

Book Club

The Future

Recommendations

Philly CocoaHeads Website Relaunch Project

Philly Craftsmanship