CJ × Hosting Meetups - Lunch and Learn

Welcome to Syntax today. We've got an episode for you on hosting meetups.

It's good to see meetups are are finally back. I guess they've been back for for maybe a year or 2, but I I feel like the comeback of meetups after COVID was very slow. And, I personally got my start in speaking at meetups. I met tons of really cool people at meetups. I can't say enough good things about going to meetups and and conferences and actually talking tech with people IRL.

So we've got CJ on today. CJ is part of the syntax team. What does CJ stand for? Do we know that? Christopher James?

Sure. Yeah. It's whatever you want. I don't tell people that's his work. Nope? Alright.

Cassette dinky. He's a he loves to say. Every single every single time we have CJ on, we'll on his byline, we'll do a new, new thing that CJ needs.

Oh, I love that. Definitely. CJ runs the Denver TypeScript meetup, and, he's here to talk to us all about that. And, also, like, I've I've run a couple meetups in my day in the past, and we just ran or Ben just ran 1 last week, and Century sponsored it as a Toronto DevTools meetup, which JS really cool. We had a had a great time chatting with everybody there. And every time I go away from a meet, I'm like, that was fun. That was really good

chitchat. And so welcome, CJ. Thanks for coming on. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk about this stuff. Definitely passionate about it. And I think well, I guess I'll talk about it, but that's kind of what it takes to run a meetup is you just gotta want to because anybody can do it. And, you know what it it takes to solve bugs is Sentry. So you wanna head over to sentry.i0forward/syntax

sign up and get 2 months for free. If you have bugs in your app, and let's face it, we all know you do, you're gonna need Sentry on your Node. So check it out. Alright.

Let's get into it 1st and foremost.

CJ, you've been hosting the Denver TypeScript meetup for how long now?

I think a little over a year at this point. Cool. And so that was hosted by was that happened? Yeah. So the the team was led by Matt Webb, and there were a few others.

But, essentially, during COVID, they went fully remote. The numbers started to dwindle, less people started showing up, and then the organizing team kind of ran out of steam and decided they were gonna do it anymore. So it it sat dormant for about a year. And and initially, they put out a message Wes like, does anybody wanna take this over? And no one really stepped up.

And then a little over a year ago, I was actually running the Vue JS meetup, and I thought well, in all that was also very small. So I thought, why not use my my energy to organize a bigger meetup? And then asked if I could take that one over and then started running the Denver TypeScript one instead of the Vue Meetup.

That's awesome. And and Denver Script is is great because it has good vibes. One of the things I I noticed about it really quickly is that it has a good location.

Did you establish the location for that, or was that already established? And and how did you go about finding a place to even host this meetup? Here in Denver, there's a place called Co Talent. They're like a technical

recruiting agency, but they have a space. It's kind of amazing because they pretty much offer it up to any meetup that wants to host. Mhmm. And so, I had been hosting the Vue. Js meetup there. The Node. Js meetup, which isn't around anymore, it was always hosted there. Denver TypeScript was always hosted there. It's really lucky he had a place like that exists Wes, essentially, they have tons of space. They always provide, free beer and drinks.

And so Oh. Yeah, Co ESLint has been the main thing where we've hosted. In the past, like, when I was running Vue, sometimes I would just search around town to see if there were, like, event spaces. And a lot of times, event spaces are developer friendly and might actually let you host for free. Depending on the size of the meetup, you also could just, like, meet up at a brewery or something like that. If you have an employer that has, like, a larger space, you could host there too. So back when I worked at 303 Software, there are a couple of times where Node ESLint wasn't available for some reason, and we ended up just letting people into the office and sat around a big conference room table and just had a meetup in there. Yeah. That's cool. It feels like that's, like, somewhat common to be able to

potentially ask your employer, hey. Can we host this here or there? I think it's probably a little bit easier if you have a a direct line to the the people who are in charge. Like, I I could never have done that when I worked at Ford, obviously. They would have said, hell no to that. But, you know, when I worked at small agencies, I could imagine approaching anybody saying, hey. Can we we host people here and and have that work? So I I think if you're out there and you're wondering, like, where can I host something? Maybe even if you have a decent space, even like a a small room or whatever, and, you could ask them. I think to your point about, like, hosting at a brewery, I think that works better for, like, meet ups that are more social. Right? Didn't you just go to something like that, Wes? Was that at a brewery?

Yeah. Yeah. The it was at Mascot Brewing in Toronto, and they gave us, like we did it with the syntax meet up as well. Often, pubs and bars will have, like, a spot or a backroom or, like, a top floor or in our case, it was a top patio where you can you can rent it out, and you say, hey. If I bring 40, 50 people here and either, hey. We promise we're gonna hit $2,000 in drinks, or if can we just bring a bunch of people? They'll often just, like, mark it off for you. Even here in Hamilton, there was one for quite a while before it got knocked down for condos Wes they would just do the top floor, and they had, like, a microphone and, like, a PA, which is really nice as well if you're doing some some talks as well. I like the ones that are at pubs as long as the there's, like, not too much music, like, bumping. You know? Because, like, the the thing that drives me nuts about conferences, parties, and meet ups is you go somewhere, and they're blasting music. And, like, I just wanna talk about, like, Node. Js module resolution patterns,

and I don't want, like like, t pain in the background where I'm trying to compete with it. Wes is the type of guy to go to a a pub and and wanna talk about Node module resolution.

That's literally what we did for, like, half an hour.

It was it was hilarious.

Yeah. I mean, I agree. And it depends on, like, what the outcome is. Right? Like, is it a is it, like, a mini conference talk type of deal, or is it just like a a Hangout? Because the syntax one that we did, it was more of like a let's get together and just meet people and chat and talk tech, but even just talk anything. But things like Denver TypeScript are a little bit more focused.

CJ, do you wanna, like, give, like, an outline of, like, what goes on at a a meetup like Denver Script and maybe the structure of it?

Sure. So I like to have things just, like, very talk focused. So every meetup, we always try to have a short talk, which is anywhere from 8 minutes to 15 minutes, and then we have a longer talk, which is anywhere from, like, 30 minutes to an hour. So So every meetup, yeah, we have the short and long talk, but we also like to start with JavaScript news. So we have an organizer team of about 4 people. So I have myself, we have CSS, Chad, and Marlena.

And, we all share responsibilities in terms of putting chairs out when the the meetup starts or being there 1st to unlock the door. And then Node of us will always pick news that's happened over the past month. So we kick the meetup off with going over the news, and then we go into the talks. I'll say another thing. We Wes might talk about this later, but one of the things I always like to do is start the meetup off mentioning that we have a code of conduct because anyone is welcome to attend these meetups, and I always like to set the ground rules. Like I say, this this is the code of conduct we have. These are the main things, and then I make sure that everyone knows who the organizers are. They all raise their hands because I mean, usually, everyone's nice and well behaved, but because anyone can attend, sometimes you might get a weirdo in there. So I like to make sure that people understand that we have some rules, and we wanna stick to those rules. Have you ever been at it? Throw somebody out Yeah. Grabbed by the scruff of the neck?

Not recently. No. Not recently. Okay. Well, let's see what we're

Is there I'm trying to think.

There there's I guess there have just been people that, like, maybe talk more than people would like or, like, try to hold people's

ear or I don't know. I don't have any specific stories. Yeah. You you do get that with with meet ups JS you get all kinds of people, and sometimes you get people who will dominate your time. And that's that's one tip we've had in the past JS just, like, learn to exit a conversation.

Been like, it was great to meet you. There's I remember, Jerry Seinfeld said this once, because he gets people come up to them, and they're maybe they're a little bit nervous or whatever. And sometimes conversation is great. Sometimes I wanna talk to somebody for an hour, and and sometimes it's just like, alright. I need to, like also, I wanna, like, do the room. I wanna meet, like, a whole bunch of other people. So, like, learning how to, like, break away from those types of conversations, especially if it's, like, uncomfortable with the type of Vercel, is is a skill in itself.

Yeah. Even if it's not uncomfortable, you know, I've learned that a lot from US. And even I use this all the time in social situations. We were just at a, it was like a kindergarten, 1st day kind of, like, ice cream Sanity. And I wanted to meet a lot of the parents. You Node? There's a lot of people there. And I was talking to a guy for a long time, and I had a great conversation. So it's not like it was an awkward conversation.

But I just wanted to go meet other people around, and I used these Wes Boss techniques. Hey. Really great to meet you. You know? It's like Yeah. It it really works in any situation, so I I feel like that can help outside of things. I do think this, the code of conduct thing is great. I cannot imagine being in a situation where I'm a guest at something like that and would want to disrupt in any sort of way. Yeah. But some people, I guess, just don't have that that kind of awareness.

So you you're hosting a meetup.

You you wanna start either hosting a brand new one or you're taking over someplace.

How do you get people to show up, 1? And, 2, how do you let them know it's happening? How do you get RSVPs? Those types of things. Like, what has worked for you?

Yeah. So we do have a Twitter account. It it doesn't have too many followers, but I think anyone that wants to stay up to date at least is following our account. And anytime we publish the latest event, we put a link there, so that helps. And then we also have some Discords and Slacks that are a part of the the Denver area. There's, like, the Colorado tech community and one other one that has have a few 1,000 devs on it. So, I'm always sure to post the link in there, like, a month before to to get people to show up as well. And then it's sad to say, but it's still the case that Meetup Scott is kind of the biggest one in the place that most people go to when they're looking for a meetup. Mhmm. So that's where actually, where we we have all of our event details. And Meetup Scott itself just being a discovery platform, like, people will will find it there just because our meetup is posted on there. I say sad to say because it's super expensive.

They have a monopoly, so, like, their site is jank sometimes, but they do nothing about it because they're, like, the only one that that, like, you have to use. But yeah. So we use meetup.com, and and I think the I let me just pull it up real quick because the the meetup itself like, because I took it over from a previous group, yeah, it has over 3,000 members on it for just for the Denver script meetup. And when some people come across that, they it it's, like, almost like an automatic legitimizer. Like, oh, you have a meetup with 3,000 people. We we usually have, like, attendance of, like, 40, 50 people, but, yeah, just being on meetup.com is one thing. I will say that Guild is a a newer one that's coming around, and and it feels like it's it's picking up steam and more people are using it. But I think that's one of the issues with Meetup platforms. It's, like, critical mass because, like, Meetup already has so many people on it that it's it's a lot easier for people to find you. And so if you use these alternative platforms, you kind of have to do the work to actually get the word out for it.

Yeah. A guild put together by a friend of the show, Taz. Yeah. Wes has known Taz for a very long time. Right?

Yeah. It's funny. I actually Taz Wes huge in the Toronto meetup scene, and now he he's literally, like, at every conference now. I think he lives in London, but he goes to every single conference and is always talking. Like, he loves in person events.

Yeah. Guild is Guild is working on some pretty cool stuff around

that. Yeah. Yeah. He's the man. Cool. So Meetup or you can check out Guild or anything like that. Yeah. The let's just say the Meetup Node is actually kinda funny because

the discovery platform is great, but, also, you get a lot of people who are just there for the the pizza and beer, which is kind of funny. We we said on the last one, which is at the Syntax Meetup. I think we used Meetup, and we had at least 3 people who had no clue what Syntax was, and they are just showing up. And several of them were not even, like, developers. They were simply just there.

They're nice people, but it's it's kinda hilarious where people drop in. They grab a couple beers, couple pieces of pizza,

say hello, and then go on their way. So, if you're looking for a free dinner, it's probably a good good place to go. I don't know if I could ever do that, though. Like, I'd be so anxious, and I'm not even an anxious guy. Yeah. I couldn't do that for something I don't know anything about. But I would be lying if I were to say that I I haven't shown up to JavaScript at least once for a, free dinner even though I did want to see the tech talks and be a part of the community. But, you know, I do I do love showing up and just chit chatting it and, you know, grabbing a free slice of pizzas and bet about it as well. Can we talk about about that JS like, who's paying for all this beer and and pizza? Like, how do you get people to to pay for that? So you you try to find sponsors. But like I said, Cotellent is essentially because even having an event space is a is a sponsorship, so we appreciate that. And then the fact that they provide the beer as well, they're basically sponsoring that. But if you can't, then you you find some company and you let them know that, hey. We'll we'll advertise. We'll put your logo on the intro slides. We'll let people know who you are and that you're you're sponsoring us. You can sometimes like, some companies will set up, like, $200 a month or something like that, or they they might set a limit of Scott. But then you can use that money for getting drinks, getting food, or maybe even reserving an event event space if you haven't found one like that. Mhmm. But, yeah, the main thing is finding some company that will pay for the stuff. I I will say, like, for most of the time of the when I was running the Vue. Js meetup, we didn't actually have any corporate sponsors. I was the sponsor. Like, I would I would actually put my Venmo QR code up in the beginning and be like, hey. I bought the pizza.

If you wanna help out, throw me a couple dollars. But, ultimately, I I didn't expect to get any of the money back. I was kind of just like, I I wanted to have the meetup. I wanted to get it going, and that's kind of what it took because I couldn't couldn't find any sponsors for it. What about getting people to speak? I know, Wes, you said you got a lot of experience talking at at meetups. My very first

conference talk Vercel, and it's not really a conference talk, was that React TypeScript in Denver. Was it React Scott? Denver React. That's what it was. And I did that because I had gotten a talk at Zeit today, which is now Vercel.

And I saw the venue. And I was like, I'm not prepared to speak at this venue.

So I messaged the, the folks at Denver React, and I was like, can I please speak? And, they let me on for, you Node 20 minute spot. But besides people approaching the Denver script,

you know, themselves, how do you get people to actually speak and and fill that space? Because that feels like that would be stressful. It's one of the hardest parts. And, honestly, like, I think one of the reasons why I'm why I do like running meetups is because I like giving talks too. So, like, when I ran the Vue Meetup, if I couldn't find a speaker, I would just give a talk. Like, I would pick something about VueStack, like, it would it basically just be the the CJ show. But for TypeScript, we we do have quite a few people that have, submitted talks, and then more and more people are interested. But on our site, we have a talk submission form. So we always let people know, like, at the start of the meetup, at the end of the meetup, in the middle of the meetup, we always say, we're looking for speakers. Please, please, please, submit your talks. And so we have a form where people can submit.

And the form itself has different types of talks. Right? If you wanna give a lightning talk or a long talk or a short talk. And we even say for some people, like, if you just have an idea for a talk or you wanna give a talk, but you have no idea where to start, just submit something, and then the organizers will will work with you. Because all all the organizers, of our meetup have have speaking experience, so we're we're really trying to kinda, like, foster that community of of people practicing. And that's that's one of the reasons I I like hosting the meetup JS it being a a practice avenue, just like you said for, like, if you wanna give a talk at a conference, you kinda have to start somewhere. Like, it's pretty hard to just start speaking at conferences. And so, one of the things I do at my meetup is I make sure that it's live streamed or at least recorded, So that way, anybody that does give a talk at least has some evidence that they can share when they're submitting conference talks and stuff like that. How how long are these talks usually? It varies. So, a lightning talk, we say, is 8 minutes with 2 minutes for Wes,

and then short talk, up to 20 minutes, and then a long talk, anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. Yeah. And do you do you feel like live streaming hurts attendance? I know that's, like you know, even, like, with online conferences now or conferences, they'll stream the things. I always wonder about that. You Node? It it even goes back to, like, sports where they would black out a sports game just so that you had to buy, tickets to go to it. I mean, they get that so, like, do you feel like that live streaming hurts or or helps the Denver TypeScript meetup?

I haven't found that it hurts. If anything, I only just hear praise for, like, thank you so much for streaming. I couldn't make it out of the house today.

Or if somebody was a speaker, thanks so much for streaming because now I have the recording of the talk. Right now, our our YouTube channel and and livestream isn't very big. We, at most, have maybe, like, 5 or 6 people tuning in. But, like I said, the main reason I do it is just to have, like, a record of the talks actually happening. Wes thing I I do wanna add about finding speakers is, like, ask people as well. Like, after you've you've run a meetup a few times and you start getting some regulars, and you maybe like, so we also have a a networking, like, 15 to 20 minutes before the event starts and then also after the event. And during that time, I'm just, like, talking to people, getting to know people. And if I find someone that's a regular, and then I know that I mean, at least they know something, like, they're they're technical in some way. They have some technical job. I mentioned it was, like, hey. You should give a talk on that. And that's what we also, like, usually like to say is, like, it it doesn't matter if you you don't have to be an expert to give a talk. You can literally give a talk on, I learned this thing and here's why I like it, or I learned this thing and here's why I don't like it, or you could give a talk on your experience using a specific library, or you give a talk on a specific code opinion that you have. Like, you can literally talk about anything, and so we we try to let people know that that it doesn't it doesn't have to be perfect, and you don't have to be an expert.

I always love meetup talks because they were, like, a little bit more casual, you know, a little bit more interesting in little areas that people have have dipped into it. You know? Like, one of my 1st meetup talks was on, like, webcam access for that type of thing, and that kicked off a whole bunch of conference talks that I did. And we had a guest a couple weeks ago, Alex Rudin, who does the drag and drop the new drag and drop library. It was called Pragmatic Drag and Drop. And the way I found out about him was I don't know. Some there was some link somewhere on Twitter about a meetup talk on drag and drop. And I, like, watched the whole thing, and I was like, this is fascinating

that this guy has gone deep into it. So there's there's really good stuff in Meetup talks that is not necessarily as polished and as as big as maybe a full blown conference talk would be. Is there, like, any vetting process to make sure that people are going to be able to deliver some kind of value? I or or maybe even, like, if somebody's new to it, that you'd give them a a shorter talk, or or is there any process there?

Yeah. So we don't have anything official internally, but we do try to make make make sure because we have had sometimes like, a talk will end up being, like, a sales pitch or maybe somebody shows up and they're completely unprepared, they don't have any slides, and they're just, like, talking.

First of all, you wanna get speakers, but then if you do get speakers and they're not that great, you you wanna try to prevent that. So on our, talk submission form, we actually have a a checkbox that says, is this a sales pitch, or could this be considered a sales pitch? And sometimes Wes allow that, especially if it's, like, a sponsor, but we don't wanna talk that's just somebody selling something, so there's that. And then if somebody is new, I I let them know, like, there's a, like, an open comment box that they can leave on there Wes they can ask for tips, and then we have a Discord that we invite them to after they've been accepted for a talk. And we let them know, feel free to share your slides.

Like, what concerns do you have? Those kinds of things. I've never done any sort of, like, vetting to see, like yeah. I don't do deep research into have they given talks before or Yeah. How good of a how good of a speaker they are. I just wanna make sure, like, they're a real Vercel, and they're giving a talk on something that they're interested in. Yeah. I wonder if, like, a,

like, just a a page that's, like, what to expect for your 1st talk, you know, is JS enough. Because we kind of do that with Syntax where we let them know, like, this isn't the opportunity to pitch your product and know exactly how you feel about that because we we get just an endless amount of requests for people to come on the show, and you can tell pretty instantly if they're just trying to sell our audience something. And that's not good for anybody, and and I can imagine going to a meetup and spending that time only to get, like what what are that? Like,

when you buy a Yeah. Timeshare. Timeshare. Yeah. It's like a timeshare pitch. Yeah. Yeah. I would mention so you mentioned it in talking about also making sure, like, maybe they do a smaller talk first. In my experience, people kind of self select to that. Like, if they've never given a talk, they're like, there's no way I could talk for 30 minutes. I'm just gonna do a lightning talk, test it out, see if I, like, have the nerves to do it. But I think that's a good strategy as Wes. It's, like, give them a short slot, and then if they do well, maybe a couple months later, allow them to do, like, a longer talk that they wanna do. Yeah. Yeah. And if anyone's listening and thinking, maybe I would like to try do that because it's it seems kinda fun to go to conferences and and speak at them, but, like, it's the road to that might not be super clear. But just pick

3 things in CSS that are brand new or, hey. I built this. This is how how I did it. These are the problems that I hit. And just just scaffold out, like, a 10 minute talk and just share what you've Deno. And then I think that those make very interesting content, and you're gonna you're gonna get past that initial hump of, oh, wow. I did my 1st talk. Like, I remember when I was first asked to do my 1st meetup, I was like, me? No no shot. No chance. Like oh, and I was like, I'm gonna prepare for months for this type of thing. And then, like, you look back on it, and it was like, this was 20 people in a like, sitting on Aeron chairs in somebody's office eating pizza. Like, probably Node ever remembers

that day in their life at all. But when you're on the other side of it, it it feels a little bit scary, and it's, yeah, it's it's it's a good idea to get into it. Yeah. And if you're in the audience and you're watching somebody give a talk and maybe it's their 1st talk or they're new, you know, I think it's always helpful to, you know, express gratitude to the speakers afterwards even, like, personally, just to even go up to them and say, hey. Great talk. I mean, anything like that can, boost somebody's confidence or, like, get them feeling a little bit better about doing it in the future. We did an episode episode 19 of syntax, how to get into speaking at conferences, that has a ton of tips from Wes, who at at that time, I think I wasn't doing very many talks at all. I don't know if I had even done one, but you had been doing a whole bunch. And it wasn't till after a little bit of getting into syntax that I even I even picked it up myself. So, definitely, I I think there's a lot of benefits to doing it, whether that is just through personal confidence, but career development or things like that. It can make you, research a topic thoroughly enough to understand it. To be able to explain it to somebody else is always great too. And I know it's getting more and more competitive to look for jobs out there, so being on that stage and doing those types of things can be really, really good.

Yeah. I I would tie into that, though. Like, technical communication is, like, a huge skill in being a an engineer or, anybody that writes software. So, like, this is another way to practice that. Like, if you're trying to sell your team on why you should use x library or why you should implement this pattern, like, practicing talking in front of people and, like, getting your point across, I think, is huge to and that carries over into, like, your professional life as well. Word.

Node thing I wanna I wanna add about, like, talks is that, like, your meetup doesn't necessarily have to be talks either. And, like, sometimes, if we can't find a speaker or yeah. Maybe, like, we're just coming back from the Christmas holiday or something like that, Wes didn't have anything lined up. We try to do other types of events. So, like, one one time Wes did, just like a we had a bunch of technical topics ready to go, and then we told people to group up into groups of no more than 5 or 6. And then the whole night was just spent having conversations about a specific topic. So we mentioned a topic, people chat about it, and then, we move on from there. So that all that required was a facilitator. You didn't have to be an expert or anything. It's just somebody to make sure that you kept time and and you had topics ready to go. And another thing I did was I just called it a community night Wes, honestly, it takes a specific skill set because I'm pretty good at, like, coming up with examples on the fly and just, like, pulling stuff out on the fly. But, basically, I just sat up there, and I was like, we're gonna start with these 3 topics, but wherever it takes us, here we go. And so people I had I said you can ask Wes, or if somebody mentions something and you have no idea what it is, I'm gonna pull up the docs, and I'll explain it. And so that was more of just, like, it got tons of people in the audience to actually ask questions or also to give their own experience. Right? Because I could be up there talking about, I don't know, Express JS or Next JS or something like that. But if somebody in the audience has experience with it, then I I would, like I'd leave the floor to them. Like, yeah. Tell me about why I'm wrong, or or whatever else. So, yeah, doing any kind of of, like, technical topics or a community night, and then also just, like, general networking. Like, one of the meetups that I attend pretty often here in Denver is the develop happy hour, and that's all about just meeting up at a brewery and drinking and talking to people. So, like, you don't for that, they don't have to organize speakers. They just need to make sure they have a venue big enough for everyone, and it's still a good time to go and meet people and and even talk about tech at that point, but much more casual. When I taught at the boot camp, every Friday, we do we do show and tell. And every now and then, we didn't have anybody lined up. Usually, what we would do is say on, like, a Monday and be like, hey. You you're doing show and tell on Friday.

Have something ready to show the class of Mhmm. Something that you learned or something. And every now and then, it would just be, like, wide open, like, almost like a karaoke.

Anyone that can can go up, and it was often really interesting to see people you just plug your laptop in, and you just riff on it. And, obviously, that's that's probably terrifying for a lot of people, but, again, it's a it's a good skill set.

Yeah. It's a good skill set. And if you're wondering, like like, how to get into this or even, like, you wanna do a meetup light, you know, one of my 1st agency jobs, we had, what were called brown bag lunches or lunch and learn JS something that we we would call them, where once a month, one of the engineers would get picked to teach the rest of the team something over lunch.

And that is like an internal meetup. And you could start there if your team doesn't have something like this or you're not used to anything like that. That feels like a a a meetup light or a a good start to maybe potentially even hosting something JS just by hosting something on work time Wes everybody's gonna be there. You can get practice speaking to people you already Node, and, like, you're not, like, speaking to a bunch of random people. So I do think that's kind of like a a good introduction to this kind of stuff. I'm wondering, CJ, what's the worst part about hosting a Meetup?

Probably the Angular devs.

Angular devs. I mean and so I I do wanna say, like, if if you're doing this on a team, you have to collaborate with people. Right? And so I've been lucky enough to find a team of co organizers that that show up, that, respond to my Discord messages, that are, like, basically helping me do the meetup as Wes.

Because in the past, a lot of times, for for whatever reason, I kinda had to do everything myself. So, like, I would make sure the the venue is ready to go. I'd make sure the food is ready to go. I'd set up the live stream. I'd be the emcee.

And if you can share those tasks with a team, that is gonna make your life a whole lot easier. So the worst part is potentially or, yeah, the hardest part is finding a good team of reliable organizers that you can you can work with. Yeah. I guess, honestly, like, food is always hard too. So, I mean, I honestly, I I make it Yarn, though. So whenever I I do food at the meetup, I try to make sure that I have everything for all, dietary restrictions. So we always have something that's gluten free, that's dairy free, and then stuff for for everyone else. Not every meetup does this, but part of also making people feel included is having that kind of stuff available for them, which is tricky to do because we actually like, whenever we order pizza, we order from 2 different restaurants because it's cheaper to get Domino's for everyone, but they don't do, like, gluten free or dairy free. And so we get the gluten free and dairy free some from some other pizza place, but that's just hard because we we want to do that. You don't necessarily have to do that. Yeah. I think that's important, though. Like, imagine showing up to a meetup

and you have, like, very specific allergies or dietary restrictions, and they have, like, 8 pizzas and none of them fit your, restrictions or allergies or anything. You'd feel pretty, unaccepted by this community. So, like, that that feels like, something you should probably definitely consider. I wanna pose a question to the room here. We've all been to meetups.

Wes, CJ, and and I'll answer 2 JS, what is the 1st meetup you ever went to, and what was it like?

Yeah. I I was trying to think back because I remember the 1st meetup I went to here in Denver, but then I remembered I went to meetups before when I was living in New Jersey. Like, I would commute to New York City. So, one of the 1st meetups, it wasn't a a tech meetup, but I went to a Reddit meetup. It was like a Reddit board game meetup. But pretty soon after that, I found the Angular JS meetup, and it actually met at the the Google office in in New York City. So that was pretty cool to see. And I guess my impressions were, like, it was the only tech meetup that I knew of, and it was, like, very well put together because it was, like, by Angular and at the Google offices. Later on, when I started going to other meetups, I realized that it takes a good organizing crew and and a and a good, it takes effort to actually put on a good meetup, and that was definitely a good one. Nice. My very first meetups was

not even coding related. So back when Twitter was first getting off the ground, back when, like, the iPhone Node was coming out, Twitter was very, like, geocentric, meaning that, like, you would see people that are tweeting near you. And it was really cool because I was very new to to tech, but I was going to all of these tweet ups, which was lots of people that were in the, like, tech scene. You know? And I met so many amazing people from those meet ups, lots of people who were running agencies. I got lots of really good work there, lots of other developers, lots of people who are in marketing.

Like, that opened so many doors to being able to work for myself and work with them, and it was amazing. So, like and they would also do this 1 once a year called, like, South by Southwest.

Everybody used to it. That was the one. That was the big conference in Austin. Everybody would go to that, and they would do, like, a pre party. I think they call that North by Northwest or something like that.

And they did this this huge pre party Wes it's just just a bunch of people that work in tech that got together. And, again, like, it was so much fun meeting all of these people. I still have relationships with a lot of these people many, many years later, probably, what, 15 years later. But the first, like, actual meet up meet up, like, for tech that I went to was Toronto JS, and I think I I think I even spoke at the 1st one that you went to? Not the 1st Toronto JS, but, like, one of the 1st meet ups I ever went to was Wow. Somebody asked me to speak at it, which was I think I think also because I had been doing ladies learning code, which was I was teaching.

Some people were like, alright. He's a little bit comfortable with that. It the timeline's a little fuzzy, but Sure. Those those were the early ones. And then I did, like, a a tutorial at one of them, which is another type. Like, people brought their laptops, and we did, like, a quick 20 minute coding tutorial as part of the meetup, which was really neat. Like, we had starter files, and you went home having

coded something. So my first one was a Ann Arbor Drupal Meetup.

And I remember it very distinctly because they talked about Sass and Haml, which at the time was only a like a Ruby technology.

It was still built in Ruby and only Ruby on Rails folks were really using it. And I left that meeting being like or that meetup just being like, Sass rules. I've never heard of this thing before. It's so cool. And that that Wes, like, even, like, the SCSS syntax, like, wasn't even the main way that people wrote SASS at that point. It was the actual SASS syntax.

And I I went home and I made YouTube videos about it, and that kind of, like, blew up my YouTube channel. So it's crazy how influential The energy gap. Singular meetup can be. Yeah. Because that, yeah, that really changed my my career in a lot of ways. In that in that same, like, vein, like, what was the best meetup you guys have ever been to? Yeah. It's hard to say. I mean, honestly, I would just say, like, the early days of Denver script. So, I moved to Denver back in, 2015, and back then, the

meetup scene here was so vibrant. Like, Denver TypeScript would regularly have a 100 people or more attending. There are, like, 5 or 6 other tech meetups always happening. That's honestly what's inspired me to try and keep TypeScript going is, like, I wanna get the the meetup community, here in Denver back to that point. And so, yeah, I just remember showing up, and, like, there's tons of people or eating pizza. Everyone's talking about tech. They were, like, really good topics. Like, I can't even remember what it was, but just the atmosphere alone JS, like I remembered it. I'm always trying to replicate that or or make it keep happening. I think the best ones I've been to I don't specifically remember which one it was, but

the thing I take away from them is the simply the social aspect, being able to meet people, which is why I am gung ho for meetup without a talk because the talks are a lot of more work. You have to have a projector and a PA and something like sometimes, developers just wanna get together and talk shop. You know? Sometimes those are are really fun as well, being able to just get together and and meet like minded people and have some really good conversations. So that's like, if I look back at it, like, I don't remember any of the talks, really, but I do remember the people

and the conversations we've had about tech. Yeah. You know what, Wes? For a lot of my life, I've been way less social than you. So, like, I I can think of, like, many many talks that I've been to or meetups that were, like, mostly influential for the tech. The best one I remember going to a Southeast Michigan JavaScript meetup where somebody was showing Meteor to the 1st time, and it was pretty pre Meteor one point o. So it was very early in Meteor. Yeah. And the thing I remember most about it besides being like I mean, at that point, I was mostly working in Drupal. And if I built a node site, it was just like super basic Express Vercel. But I remember watching this talk, and the most fun thing about it is the moment that this guy shows a real time demo, every other person in the audience was trying to hack it. And since it was on the screen, things were just popping up on the screen, and it's real time. And he he was cracking up because he was like, you think I didn't think of this? Keep trying. You know? It was just, like, very, very funny. And I just had I remember it felt like, what a cool community this is. Yeah. Something comes up like this. It's a cool tech. I'm, you know, inspired by it, but at the same time, everybody is trying to break it. And that that, like, says so much about the the community.

The audience participation once I went to another one where it was, like, if they had some real time stuff, and then they they told told everybody to go on their phones. Or at the time, nobody had phones. You know? It was open up your laptop and do the real time. I think I think we had phones back then. But it's so those are the best demos where you're like, holy smokes. You get really excited about it, and everybody gets to chime in. I did, the webcam putting glasses over people's faces, like, 15 years ago, and then I I would turn the MacBook around and put it on the audience. And then all the audience would have glasses overlaid on them, which is, like that's nothing these days. But at the time, it's so exciting.

Yeah. Yeah. Because if you go back, we were just doing static web pages or, you know, content sites or blogs and stuff. So once more dynamic stuff was possible, it was all just kind of shocking to see it in action. Yeah. Yeah. Especially because YouTube wasn't, like, YouTube wasn't necessarily a place where you're going to see this kind of tech. It was conferences or meetups.

Yeah. Yeah. So we we've talked a lot a lot about, like, what it takes to run a meetup or, like, how to get speakers and stuff like that. But I feel like most of the people listening to this episode are probably just gonna be an an attendee rather than a meetup organizer. I would hope. I would say go out there, organize meetups. Like, we we literally need organizers out there. Like, meetups aren't gonna happen unless people put them on. Or even just help. Yeah. Yeah. Or help. Yeah. Should be a co organizer, maybe, like, help put the chairs out. Yeah. Like, definitely get get involved, I guess, is what I'm saying. But, and ultimately, as an attendee, how should you what should you do or how should you behave? I would say, just be curious. So ask questions. I like, for myself, I have, like, social anxiety, and I'm always, like, very quiet. And so it's, like, harder for me to even get the the courage to go to these meetups because they're usually, like, very social events. But I I've even had success just, like, hanging around, listening to other people talk, or just being curious in general. And then also, like, I know a lot of, like, newer devs or beginners are told that they should go to meetups for, like, networking. But my advice there is just go and be curious and be yourself. Don't go there specifically looking for a job because Node really wants to talk to somebody who all when their only thing that they want is to find a job. Really, you go to meetups to meet people and, basically, just have your face out there so people have seen you and know who you are. So if they're ever hiring or they know somebody who who's hiring, they can be like, oh, yeah. I talked to whoever at at this meetup. You should you should check them out. Yeah. We've talked about that a lot on this show where, like, you know, the number one hack to getting hired is

networking.

It sounds like that's, like, such an absurd statement considering, you know, how common sense it's always been or something that's, like, a classical thing. But just being a part of the community and chatting with people is a it's a hack. It's a hack to, you know, finding employment. People are looking, and you want them to think of you. I think, like, one of the best things you can do as a an attendee also

is, like, learn how to ask good questions and learn how to pull information out of people. I always try to do this at whenever I go to a meetup or conference because there's often really cool people who are not excited to talk about what they're working on. Like, Scott and I or whatever, we're pretty good at that, but there's a lot of people who may be a little bit anxious. And they're working on something really nifty, or they've hit specific problems, and I always try to find those people. What do you work on? What's what stack is that? How do you find that? What are your thoughts on that? And after a couple questions, they start sorta coming out of their shell, and there's some really interesting stuff. Plus, like, who doesn't love being asked questions about what you're you're working on? Who doesn't love that feeling? I have several friends who whenever you meet meet up with them, they ask such good questions about what's going on in your life, and you leave feeling like, they're so good at asking questions. You know? I always try to, like, how do I be that person for for other people?

Yeah. We have a buddy who's so good at that. Any social gathering, it's almost like a interview in a nonnegative way, but he comes with all these brilliant questions. And he he was in, like, Toastmasters, and he he had some, like, actual training in in speaking and stuff like that. So I think he picked it up not by just being good at it. I think he picked it up by practicing.

But it does it really facilitates a great conversation.

And even just somebody, like, asking follow-up questions to something. Like, somebody tells you something, you know, asking a why or what made you do that or what you know, how did you get into that? Or those types of questions can really make somebody feel like you care about what they're talking about, but, also, like, it can facilitate really interesting discussion. I'm curious your thoughts, CJ, because you've been seeing attendance numbers and you've been seeing how many people show up to things. Do you think meetups are truly back, or do you think they're still recovering? Or are they you Node? Is it a a totally different world for meetups these days?

Yeah. I mean, I can only talk from the Denver's perspective and, like, what I see here, but it it seems like they're still recovering because, so, like, I I've attended the React meetup a few times here. It's it's run-in Denver by a guy named Jeff, and it it used to be the biggest meetup in Denver. Oh, yeah. And lately, like, the numbers have dwindled. It's, like, maybe 10 or 15 people that show up. But I think I think it's hard. For 1, it used to be that everyone was in the office, and so they were already in town. And then the meetup was happening that night, but so they could just walk right over from their office to the meetup. And now a lot of people work remotely, and so to get to these meetups, you basically have to, like, revert like, you're commuting at the end of the day to get into town to attend the meetups. So from what I've seen, it's, like, it's picking up, and I I think it just it just takes people like me and my co organizers that actually wanna put this stuff on. Because it it like, if I didn't have the ambition to, like, run this thing, it wouldn't happen. Like, there there was a there was an organizing group before, like, they kind of burnt out on it and, like, it got really Yarn, and then I picked it up. But I'm at this point, it's like me and the other organizers that are the only thing left to make sure that Denver script actually happens. We're on our way up, and and I would hope that in in other cities and other communities as well, there are people that basically step up to the plate and and start organizing because that's what it's gonna take. Because it it it does feel like there are like, people want meetups. People want to be social or or come to, like, these technical events, but they just need somebody else to put them on. So people are always like, who's gonna host that meetup, or who's gonna organize that meetup? Node ever wants to organize the meetup. Yeah. I know I'm so much better at being like, I will speak at this meetup than I am, let me organize something, mostly because I'm not a planner. I'm not terrible at planning. But, you know, I'm happy to speak and and support. I will say that, like, I totally get what you're saying about the not working in the the city or whatever because a lot of these meetups happen in in cities or they happen in in larger hubs, you know, where people are at. But for me to head to North Denver at 6 PM on a Tuesday

is tough. And it's like going to the gym. After you go to the gym or while you're at the gym, you're like, this rules. I'm I gotta do this. But then before you go to the gym, sometimes you're like, I don't really feel like it today. This this seems like a lot of effort. So when you do go to a meeting or a meetup, you oftentimes really do feel energized in a way that you you don't get from just sitting at home and whatever. So I definitely encourage you if you're out there and, you know, the next meetup comes around, you're wondering if you should go, just get yourself out there and and make it happen.

Every single time I go to a conference or a meetup, I tell my wife, I don't feel like going to this. You know? Yes. It was just so annoying. I do know anything about it. Yeah. And then I come back. How was it? Oh, it was awesome. I met some really cool people. Oh, this guy works on this really interesting project, and always always well worth it. But, yeah, that it's just like the gym. Yeah. Exercise that muscle. Cool. Is there anything we didn't cover, CJ, about meetups that, you know, you felt like is important for people to know?

No. No. I would just say from from the organizing perspective, the Denver TypeScript team actually created a, organizer onboarding and organizer handbook before the roles and the things that we all had to do together Wes very, like, ephemeral. It was kinda just like, oh, did you do that, or I'm gonna be doing it this time? And over time, we realized Wes need a little bit of some guidelines. Right? So we actually have for for every month, we have a Excel sheet that has, what are the roles and who's gonna be doing them? And then, we also put together, as a team, the handbook that says, like, well, if this happens, what should you do? Or if you're taking on this role, these are your responsibilities.

Especially if you have a larger organizing team, something like that is great because it makes it easier

so that if I can't attend for whatever reason, everyone else knows what jobs I was doing, which is actually the case, next week. I'll be at LoRaCon, so I I won't be doing the Deno script meetup. But everyone already knows what should be happening or what roles I had, so they could very easily, basically, do my job if I'm not there. So I think that's important to have. Yeah. That's, I think that's important. And if you're out there, you're thinking about, should I go, Sean? I go, 1, go to the meetup. 2, if you have a good time and you wanna get involved, do get involved. If you don't have the time, whatever. I understand. But don't hesitate to get involved. People always want the help even if it's something simple. And then 3, if you you wanna test the waters in speaking, you know, there's nothing better than getting an opportunity to speak at a local meetup and share something interesting and grow those skills. You'll be better for it after you do it. So one last thing I think before we get into CJ's sick picks and shameless plugs, how do you even find a meetup? I remember when I was in Ann Arbor, there were Meetups in Ann Arbor, but they were, like, the Southeast Michigan JavaScript Meetup. And, like, this is the only JavaScript Meetup for all of Southeast Michigan. So

how do you even find these things? Like I mentioned earlier, Meetup Scott has a ton of meetups on there, and it's in most cities. So I would start there. Search for a a particular technical topic or just type in JavaScript, see what shows up. You can also sort by distance. From there, you can search on Guild. And then if you can't find things in either place, just just use a search engine and just do say JavaScript meetup, my city Node, and to see what shows up. The other aspect of that is even maybe if you can't find a meetup, maybe you find, like, an online community of people that are in your area. Because then you can maybe do some, like, maybe more casual meetups. Because like I mentioned, we have a a Slack that is people in the Denver area. There's, like, several 1000 people in there. There's a Discord as well. And so

if you can at least find that, now you've kind of, like, found an online community of people in your same Sanity, and then maybe you could organize, like, hey. Let's go to a brewery or or just like a small get together or something like that. Yeah. I I even just Googled just now, while we were talking, and I found a Reddit post where somebody linked to, like, 3 or 4 different things. And then that sent me to the Slack channel that you've been talking about in this episode. And inside of that Slack channel, there's a post that's like, here are the, you know, 20 active groups or whatever that are going on as of right now. So it's like one thing, you know, can lead you to something else, the next thing you Node. Because it's not like these things are happening super in private. People are posting about them somewhere. So as long as you're searching for them, you should be able to find something. And, hopefully, you can find something nearest you that you you can make it to without too much issue. So yeah. Cool. Well, thanks so much for for sharing your insight, CJ. I always do enjoy Denver TypeScript, and, I admire you for having the courage to put together something like that and throw it even with a group of other people because it's not something that I could do personally.

And, I do love attending. So, yeah, so shout out to you, CJ, for for doing that. And along with that, do you have a sick pick or a shameless plug for us today?

I came prepared with a sick pick. I've got Alright. Filo Filos walking tamales.

So, I I've I've been eating a a vegan diet for, I guess, close to a year Node, and it's always hard to find savory food that you could take on the go. And this is one of those. This is literally a tamale in a bag, and it's vegan. It's honestly, even if you're not vegan, these are really tasty.

So definitely check these out, because these are great. Like, if you're going on a hike, throw it in your bag, or, like, my wife and I went to Red Rocks last night to to see a movie, and they don't have vegan options there. So we had some of these in our bag, which is great.

Nice. Yeah. Those Yarn 2 of the most Denver things you could have said. We're going on a hike. We're going to Red Rocks. So I'm you could have said, I'm going to do yoga at Red Rocks. That would have been a, launching the next thing. So what you just do you heat it up, or you just,

kinda go on? Crunchies?

Yeah. I would say, like, it's tastier if you heat it for 15 seconds in the microwave, but you don't have to. Like, it it tastes fine even at room temperature.

Oh, yeah. You put on the dash of your car while you're Oh, yeah. Out?

Yeah. Man. Just, like, heat it up? Yeah. Sick.

But, yeah, my brother in law's a a farmer, and, that's what he does with his lunch. He has a name for it, which is not something I'll say on on air, but it's, it's funny.

What about, Shameless Plugs? You wanna plug anything?

Yeah. Plug, first of all, the Denver script meetup. If you're in the Denver area, come check us out. Also, if you are traveling through Denver and maybe you wanna speak, come let me know. That that'd be great too. And then also check out the Syntax YouTube channel. I've been publishing videos there. I just put out a video on Node, so definitely check that out.

Yeah. That was sick. I you know, CJ, when you said that, I was like, you did publish it? And I look on YouTube. You just published this 1 hour ago, so this is hot off the presses. I hate I did not even know you did this. Yeah. Stop using Express.

Oh, no. Which I've been calling Hano for way too long. I actually didn't even verify the pronunciation. Hano. Right? It's whatever you saw it saying in the video. Yeah. Yeah. You're certainly I've had, like, 3 people correct me in the last week, and I realized, man, I say everything wrong.

Yeah. I do that too. If I don't hear somebody say it, I just make up the I mean, I'm I'm awful at words, so I just make up how to say it. Well, cool, CJ. It's been, real, and, we'll have you on again sometime soon. But, yeah, thank you for sharing your knowledge with us. Yeah. Thanks for having me. This was great. Like I said, I'm passionate about it, so always happy to talk about it. And if you have any questions or thoughts or and you wanna run a meetup, just hit me up on Twitter. Cool. And if you are hosting a Meetup and you want more people to see it, leave a comment on the video below and just say, hey. I'm hosting this Meetup. It's in this area, and just get some eyes on it. We'll be happy to share that for you. Alright. Peace.

Peace.