Something Very Special
The Auckland Web Meetup
There has been nothing more special to me than the Web Meetup. Before I joined the meetup, I had a small web development company called BlueSpark in Mt Eden. I built a lot of solutions for various companies and was a hired gun for Saatch&Saatchi. This simply meant they would just call me up and say they had this awesome site designed and it’s going live… tomorrow. This always resulted in what we call in the trade an ‘all nighter’. Don’t deliver on time, then it’s a ‘double all nighter’.
I found the Auckland Web Meetup by chance, it was hosted online at Meetup.com, the group had a few hundred members, so in my mind it was a huge event, on a big stage, filled with people. I recall thinking
John, now shut-up, just keep quiet for the first one, don’t draw attention to yourself.
The first meetup I attended was in a small computer lab at AUT in Auckland, there were about 9 or 10 people and there was little budget for the event. There was pizza and a dozen beer which you paid for in small change.
After this event I was fortunate enough to be invited to first Kiwi Foo Camp hosted by Nat Torkington. Here I talked about my ‘perceived’ lack of community in Auckland and that Wellington appeared to have an amazing community. This discussion definitely spewed out sparks in the right directions, brining Wellington into the fray definitely helped the cause.
At the second event I attended, the organiser was stepping down, I put my name forward and became the new event organiser. From here it all I need to do was fan these earlier sparks with the right people and the fire was lit.
As the new organiser, the first change I made was free beer and pizza. I also made sure that people missed out by limiting the number of seats for each event. When we were full, I made as much noise as I could to say it was ‘sold out’. This was a great way to create demand and build the brand. It definitely worked.
The other reason I think the meetup become such a huge success was due to so many great friends that helped at every turn. But it’s super important to say a big thanks to CactusLab and the two founders Karl & Matthew.
I have made so many friends through the meetup and if you wonder why a subset of (slightly older) developers seems to know everyone in Auckland, this was the meetup at work.
For this story, I really wanted to bring a number of friends along for the ride.
I asked them “what did the web meetup mean to you?”. Their stories are sprinkled below starting with my favourite from Matthew.
The meetup was different. It was open. We celebrated success (a responsive design before it existed). We applauded failure as many of us had failed in the same manner. We encouraged everyone to present, because everyone had a story to tell.
The meetup changed lives. After an amazing talk from Stephen Harris, co-founder of Ninja Kiwi, Shaun Lee took this inspiration and the final results returned over $200,000 in revenue. People discovered which companies they really wanted to work for and changed jobs.
The meetup set standards. The presentations at meetup changed how we worked, overnight. From IE to Firefox. CSS to LESS. From ‘px’ to ‘em’s. From HTML & CSS to Flash 7*. From fixed-width design to mobile to responsive. Arial to Helvetica. From PHP to Ruby then back to PHP to Symfony to Symfony 2. From Firebug to Charles Proxy. From Photoshop, well actually the Fireworks demo was not convincing, we stuck with Photoshop.
The meetup was a platform. We created a vehicle where the more natural speakers could practise the art of presenting. At our peak, we were the second-largest meetup in New Zealand (next to the hiking meetup)
It was also part of a deep down plan for something bigger in my mind. I wanted the meetup to springboard to the next big thing. It had an amazing tribe of people, sponsors and a handful of presenters that took their talks to the next level. It had a receptive audience to practise jokes on and see what presenting styles worked, and what sucked. We learned quickly.
THE FORMAT
The typical format of the meetup was 3–4 speakers, roughly 30 minutes each. We had a near unlimited supply of amazing Epic craft beer. During these early days Luke Nicholas would arrive personally to deliver his wares in a fully ladened Toyota Corolla. The license plate said BEER and it had dice in the mirror.
After the second speaker and a refreshing beverage or two, pizza would arrive. It took about eight people to carry the delivery from a car parked outside the venue. I felt pretty sorry for the driver, I recall getting 90 boxes of pizza. It was quite an incredible sight, I think a small sedan can only fit about 85 boxes of pizza for future reference.
Networking occurred at the start and end of each meetup, this was one of the best parts. It always involved a bit of yelling to actually get the ‘web folk’ to sit down. After the meetup was finished, I generally led a small group of around 10-20 people to some drinking establishment where we only ever talked about the iPhone and app development*.
THE PRESENTERS
We had so many great people that brought something special to the Meetup. The 20x20 format was super popular with our members. We had the most RSVPs for these sessions as they were fast and action packed.
One of my favourite sessions was with Glenn Jones. Glenn has some incredible talent combined with insane productivity. His designs are nearly always humorous and appeal to a broad audience. He was an instant hit with our crowd.
Matthew took meetup really seriously, he always presented immaculate slides on work he was doing at Cactuslab.com, or on typography.
Karl I couldn’t have done it without you von Randow. Was always keen to present. Was great at presenting. Pretty funny when he wasn’t making BlueSpark jokes. Karl helped immensely with running and organising the meetup. Thanks Karl!
He later went on to form his own band/iOS meetup which is still going [redacted joke]strong today[/redacted].
The second 20x20 meetup in 2011 was our most attended meetup. This meetup was held at the brand new Spark building in downtown Auckland. The room was spacious and modern. I think we had three huge projectors for each section of the room. Great audio. It finally had become the event I had envisioned four years earlier.
Robert O’Callahan was also very popular. He worked on the core rendering engine for the Firefox browser. It really did blow everyone's mind to have someone in the same room, who shapes the web, talking about the future of the internet, then turning around and asking for feedback. That was cool.
One session that stood out, was the 2008–09–11 Internet Explorer 8 vs Firefox 3.1 talk. This was a great tech talk, that turned into a friendly boxing match, a jab here, jab there, quick hook and retreat, finishing off with a game of monopoly.
Justine Sanderson did the most mind blowing presentation to a huge group of self proclaimed smart and attentive developers and designers. To understand why it was mind blowing, watch this video and count the passes by the players in white. The whole room erupted in debate around the passes, “14, no 15, I got 16 you missed the overhead pass”. Justine resumed the video for the 2nd half. I won’t ruin it for you… Our feeble brains simply melted… It was fantastic!
The Inverted “m” Curve of Presentation Quality
Something that I found to be super interesting, was my empirical research (and highly detailed notes*) on presentation quality. After running meetup for so long, I noticed that generally the most anxious or least anxious presenters gave the best presentations. The semi-anxious were a mixed bag, I have detailed this with a highly scientific graph below.
THE PEOPLE
The meetup wasn’t just about great presenters, awesome organising, free beer and pizza. It was the members that made it special. For the next part, ex web meetup members can be heard saying. “Oh f*** I look young”, to which the replies will be, “yes… yes you do…”
THE LITTLE JOKES
The meetup was full of jokes, I completely forgot how crazy we were. I found a 19 second clip of Ross Howard doing a Kanye during a Robert O'Callahan presentation.
Matthew Allen didn’t want to be left out, I found this little gem in his design presentation. This is the only kerning lesson that presenters had trouble with.
Peter Asquith with a custom designed slide in a feeble attempt to get the crowd to laugh. Pathetic, those balloons look fake.
Will it Blend? For some reason Mike Rishworth had a first generation iPhone that he was keen to show off. I found a small momento from the “Will it Blend” skit that we did during this talk. It is looking worse for wear after my blender struggled to blend this photo & cardboard iPhone replica.
THE FIRE THAT BURNED A LITTLE TOO BRIGHT
When meetup started before I arrived, it had a simple monthly cadence, informal talks and simple catering. When I took over, we kept the monthly cadence but it took quite a ‘super human’ (yes I am quoting myself) effort to make this work. The meetup took about three days a month to run and organise. A few key things needed to be done to get any one meetup off the ground.
- Venue: This definitely caused us problems as venues came and went.
- Sponsor: Web development companies could easily sponsor an event in the early days, 10 pizzas and some beer. But when sponsorship was over $2k for a car full of pizza and beer, this became much harder. Especially since I didn’t have a lot to trade for the sponsorship other than a few logos here and there. The last two meetups we did, were paid and not sponsored.
- Presenters: Half my time was spent deflecting presentations. The rest of the time trying to coax a person into spending 30 minutes on stage in front of their peers. All waiting to jump on you when you spell “URL” wrong. I know who you are.
- Beer & Pizza: Far from rocket science, but at 90 pizzas you needed to call PizzaHut a few times to book it and confirm on the day. Beer was simple, text Luke. Or hit him up on any social media platform of your choice, as he was on them all.
- RSVPing: Time to make some noise. All the noise generally was made through Twitter. What was a lot of fun was guessing how quickly the meetup would fill up from announcement. We typically filled about 200 places in about 2 hours. It was a real adrenaline ride. F5, F5, F5… Bingo 200 places, gone.
- Hosting: Oh, that’s right, gotta do my slides, mention sponsor. Oh bugger, a presenter has pulled out. In this situation, either myself or Karl would just fill the spot. I think we did a great job with our last-minute presentations. I think we both enjoyed it and the thrill of the night was a great reward.
From the beginning I sort of knew that getting really big would be a problem. The ever-increasing energy required to run meetup had been a bit like a candle consuming itself. But to the credit of the community there are some great meetups that are burning bright with a new energy.
I have managed to ‘hack’ meetup.com to get the raw data of all our meetups and have printed out the following list and titles starting at the very first meetup.
THE NUMBERS
We run 36 events
Delivered 104 presentations
Hosted 4235 members (that actually blows my mind).
Consumed 1058 pizzas
Drank 847 boxes (12 packs) of Epic
NEXT
This article was a huge amount of fun to write. It has taken me some time to pull all the content together for the Web Meetup, and I loved telling this story.
If you have something you want to share about meetup, use the comments below. It will be awesome to have them as part of this story.
For the next article I am thinking about the arrival of the iPhone. I think this has to be written before I can write about Web09. Plus I have about 15 MiniDV tapes to import from last decade.
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