BGL Tech hosts its first .NET Meetup
In my second blog post, I thought I’d talk about our inaugural Peterborough .NET Meetup, which took place on Tuesday 30th April.
What inspired me to set-up a .Net Meetup in Peterborough?
Following BGL’s investment in a new tech hub in Sunderland, I got involved in hiring our new .NET Engineers. It just so happened that, on the evening before some of these interviews, a .NET Meetup was taking place in Newcastle (organised by Hainton.net). There were a number of reasons I wanted to attend:
- I’d never been to a Meetup before and (secretly, unbeknown to anybody else) wanted to find out what it takes to run one, as it had been on my mind for a few months!
- It was a great opportunity to meet the wider recruitment team
- To learn about the tech being discussed (CAKE which is a .NET build automation system)
- To check out the .NET scene and engineering talent in the Newcastle area
The initial set-up…
Taking learnings from the Hainton.net Meetup, I made the decision to go for it, and set-up a .NET Meetup in Peterborough.
I realised that, to be successful, it would have to be arranged outside of normal working hours, somewhere convenient, with food and drink provided, and on a subject that would be exciting and engaging. There was also the job of actually arranging, promoting and presenting at it!
I had the support to host the Meetup at BGL offices, had the cost of food and drink covered, and a date set in the diary. To promote the event, I set up a Meetup.com account, had posters designed and engaged my tech colleagues across BGL to spread the word across their teams. I also announced the Meetup at our department’s weekly stand-up. It was well received, with many of my colleagues expressing interest in attending and asking what subject I would be presenting on…
That was a good question! After giving it some thought, I decided to present on WebAssembly and Blazor — two technologies I didn’t know much about but had heard a lot of exciting things. People soon started signing up and with that, I knew that I had enough interest.
Preparing content for the day…
I had seven weeks to learn about WebAssembly and Blazor, as well as preparing the presentation and creating technical demos. My working day is so busy, that realistically I could only do this in the evenings and weekends — it was a big commitment but I loved the process of learning something new.
First, I had to get my head around WebAssembly: what it is, why it was developed and an understanding of the text format. This took two weeks. Although there’s plenty of documentation available, I needed to create my own demos to really understand the technology and clearly explain it to other people (and confidently answer any questions!) This took a further two weeks.
This left me with just three weeks to understand and create demos for Blazor. Unfortunately, half way through the first week of learning, Microsoft released an updated version of Blazor (.NET Core 3.0 preview 4) and Visual Studio 2019, which meant my demos needed re-writing (I promised myself not to update my software until after the Meetup!) I purposefully allowed less time to learn about Blazor than WebAssembly, because I was already familiar with C# and Razor — what I didn’t realise, was that I would need to learn about Razor Pages and Razor Components in order to understand Blazor. This took it right to the wire, leaving me with little time to prepare the presentation. In hindsight, I should have prepared the presentation as I went along…
The evening of the Meetup…
I arrived 45 minutes early to set-up the room and test out the kit so there would be no “technical surprises”. I had put some signs up in the reception area pointing people in the direction of the meeting rooms, reference material was printed, name badges were ready and the pizza arrived bang on time at 5:45pm, along with all the other refreshments. People started arriving at 5.50pm and by 6.20pm all attendees had turned up, with 26 people attending of the 30 capacity.
At 6.25pm, everyone took to their seats and I started the presentation. Of course, I was nervous, but once I had started speaking and cracked my first joke, my nerves disappeared. A good tip I received was to establish the goals of the Meetup early on, and thankfully this one was well received. These were:
- Establish an engaged and growing community who are passionate about .NET and the frameworks and eco-systems supporting it.
- Provide opportunities to learn new skills.
- Allow people to connect and network with each other.
- Be in the company of like-minded individuals.
- Learn about best practice
Some key learnings from the presentation:
- When you need people to get out of their seats and participate in an activity, double the time you think you should allow for it (the brainstorming activity took 15 minutes and I only had only planned for 5!)
- Rehearse your presentation at least twice to be sure on timings and that what you are saying makes sense
- Don’t speak for too long when talking about a specific slide in your presentation
- Try and limit comfort breaks to 5 minutes
- Practise each demo in the meeting room ahead of the Meetup
- When ordering pizza for a large group of people — from my experience, you only need to order a third of a large pizza, per person
Although the presentation overran by 30 minutes, there were no problems, people respected the ground rules, enjoyed themselves and I had nothing but positive feedback.
Conclusion…
All-in-all it was a great evening. Everybody learned something and it was a great experience for me to organise and present. I hadn’t learned something that technical in such a short space of time for 10 years (since I was studying to gain my MCSD). I am sure my family are relieved the first meetup is done now and my children have their Dad back and my wife has her husband back;-) In fact, I dedicated the first meeting to my wife!
A date for everyone’s diary for the next .NET meetup is Tuesday 25th June when the subjects being discussed are: What’s new in .NET Core 3.0 and Dockerising .NET Applications.
