Introducing Madrid Devs
A public Slack team to empower the local developer’s community
According to Meetup.com, there are 595 communities around me. From those, many are groups of developers that discuss a specific topic. This can lead to the too-specific-meetup problem and make some of them disappear, but that’s another story (I love the idea of having a Varnish Cache meetup).
The mailing lists overload problem
It’s great to find people near you that want to learn and share something you love, but keeping in touch after a meetup is not an easy task.
Meetup groups allow people to communicate with others by using a mailing list that notifies everyone when you send an email. That’s annoying, but it can be avoided by using a chat system (do you remember the old days of IRC?). A chat feels more natural than a mailing list and it doesn’t bother everyone.
What if there is a way to keep in touch with all the communities you like and discuss with people in an async way? That’s where the idea of MadridDevs started. It was also inspired by the work done by the Valencian community. They have a lot of activity on multiple channels.
Setting up the open Slack community
One of the best and most used chat systems available right now is Slack. It’s a great choice for communities as it has a free plan so you don’t have to worry about growing, but it has a little problem: invites. You need to invite people or, alternatively, share a URL so people with the same e-mail domain can register themselves. This doesn’t work for open communities.
To fix the problem I decided to use slack-in, a little server that enables public access to a Slack server. This way anyone can join the community by getting an invite.
At the moment of writing this article, the Slack team has 340 members. Some of the most active channels are #introduce-yourself, #jobs, #events, #javascript, #php, #agile, #java or #big-data. There are 30 active channels to cover the different technology stacks.
If you want to meet your local community and have fun while sharing stories, join us now.
MadridDevs is a community aimed to become a meeting point for developers in Madrid, regardless of language or technology. It’s a place to share projects, ideas, job offers, events, among others.
