Inaugural VanEE Recap
We had our inaugural event on November 9th to kick off the Vancouver Erlang and Elixir Meetup (VanEE). VanEE’s goal is to build a diverse and collaborative community of Erlang and Elixir enthusiasts of all different interests and experience levels — E & E for the people!
We were hosted at CodeCore, which was awesome (we love them). They’re just the kind of people who feel compelled to put up a white board with a hand-drawn Elixir logo.
They had set up the speaking area with lots of chairs — it was beautiful — if only we had organized a speaker! We decided to forgo a speaker for our first meetup in favour of some good old fashioned social interaction.
After organizing Code & Coffee and Vancouver Functional Programmers over the past several years, we have a fair amount of experience organizing meetups. What’s interesting is that every group is different.
Demographics
We want to identify these demographics early with the hope of encouraging diversity at our events and within the Erlang/Elixir community as a whole.
The group was almost all men, save for the 3 women (incidentally, the organizers), and primarily of Caucasian and Asian descent. This isn’t uncommon for the Vancouver tech scene
There were a few people at the event who spoke French and a few dialects of Chinese. Interestingly, we came across one person who could speak 30 languages!
Most attendees were professional programmers, and had a few languages under their belts. We hope to garner interest from developers that are earlier in their learning as well. This meetup is for everyone, regardless of experience level. It’s important to foster a welcoming environment for those less experienced, and encourage the more experienced developers to share their knowledge.
Expertise
Most people who attended had not worked with production Erlang or Elixir applications, but were interested in learning. A few people also expressed interest in Erlang, mostly to service enterprise needs and cloud computing, but the majority were there for Elixir. Many had been inspired by Brooklyn’s “An Introduction to Elixir and Phoenix for Rubyists” talk at VanRuby a few weeks prior.
There was a lot of interest in Phoenix, which is a Rails-inspired web application development framework for Elixir. Much of this interest comes from the fact that Phoenix is at least 10x faster than Rails, is fault-tolerant, has soft-realtime guarantees, and has access to advanced concurrency capabilities.
Event
We had a pretty great turn out statistically as far as meetups go; 26 registered and around 20 erlangutangs and alchemists showed up.
The wine box was not a great hit with this group (sad trombone). The soft drinks, however, were a different story!
Suggestions
- Talks
- Hackathon
- Group projects — “Be the seattle.rb of Elixir”
This seems ambitious and we can respect that. I did some research into this alleged phenomenon known as Seattle.rb, and I found some interesting items, including the fact that they have a weekly nerd party (where they work on projects at a cafe) and a monthly social.
The Plan
To start, we’re going to have TL;DR talks — essentially lightning talks from community members to give people a taste of an idea, and resources to further their learning. This will be followed by a social hour and/or workshop and/or free work period. We’ll need to feel this out in order to understand the community’s needs
We achieved our goal of getting our first event going and gained some great information about what our members are interested in. This points us in what we think is an excellent direction as we strive to provide a great experience for our members!
