Stringing Techies!
What are you stringing about?
That’s the first thought I had when I read the title for my article. I have been bashing my head for an apt title since last night. Well, it sounds good… oh, let me stop yammering about the title and dive into the article already.
Last week, I began my usual ritual of telling new members to my online group to write a short intro about themselves, so that the other members know who is getting added to the group.
When a new member asked, “So tell me, what is this group about? Do you have a website? What is the goal of this group? Is this online forum or a cult?” Well, his questions went on, for which I couldn’t come up with a precise answer. I was like, “Ya he’s right. What is this group that I am running? How to put it in words? Man, this new guy is brilliant or am I this dumb always” I wondered.
Introducing to the world, my tech group Apptastic Coders. It’s a community that ‘we’ have been driving since 2013.
Origin Story:
Most of my friends were not geeks. Period. I was like a strange creature for them. Be it college friends or school friends, they rather looked at me as the weird fellow who keeps thinking of quirky stuff. In the office, well I got excited about any new tech stuff, but I felt I had no place to turn to. But finally I found a friend Kiran, who was very much impressed by my geekiness and we had a blast geeking out.
So we thought why not challenge our self by attending a Hackathon. When we attended the Hackathon, I totally felt under prepared and out of place, but still with Kiran plus a rag tag team put together on the spot, we won for the best hack.

To better prepare for future hackathons and learning from one another, we create a google group — then we moved to Facebook — then to Whatsapp. After those initial days, we started attending a lot of Hackathons, Workshops and Meetups every weekend.
And we didn’t invite any one we met. We were very selective in picking out those who were passionate about technology, startups, and life in general.
We were also sad when we had to kick out someone who broke our rule which included ‘No forward messages from other groups’, ‘No jokes unless it involves something about tech’, ‘Don’t make long personal conversations in the group’ and in general respect everyone’s time.
That 3 member group grew into 100+ community in the last 4 years.
Any group I got inspired from?
BLRDROID!!!
The first community I really liked being part of was Blrdroid Group in Bangalore. When I was trying to develop android apps as a hobby, I learnt a great deal attending their sessions and hackathons. Their hosts worked really hard to put together lots of interesting talks and hands-on sessions.
What do we do?
Talk about new tech stuff — Communicate about Events — Ask Doubts regarding any problems we face — Try out other techies hacks — Find new like minded friends — Only once we did an offline meetup in Bangalore — Share job openings — Team together to build cool projects— Basically Geek out with other members.
The most beautiful aspect of this group is that ‘Nobody here is an expert and everybody is ready to learn from one another’

Are we Diverse?
Well, the talk of the town is about Diversity. The youngest member is 17 and the Oldest is in their 60’s. 1/4th of the group is women — working to improve the ratio earnestly. At least from 5 different countries. We have not just coders, but entrepreneurs, hiring consultants, writers, and artists.
What so great about it?
That’s why I am writing this article. Its not a such a great feat to put together a bunch of techies or people together. But building communities is always a great thing. I want more people to build vibrant communities to maximise our human capabilities.
As a group, it brings about the clash of ideas, philosophies and surprising amount of motivation to grow into a bigger persona. As you can see, we are a bunch of techies stringed together for a greater purpose.
Well, that’s my intro about my humble tech group — Apptastic Coders!
