Hacker News London Meetup, October 2016 – Review
thoeni.io
thoeni.io
All tech meet-ups in my corner of the world seem to have devolved into these TED style talks.
These days everyone wants to be a visionary discussing big ideas. Everyone talks how awesome it is to work for their startup that is changing the world or be a freelancer that earns tons of cash by writing Ruby while surfing on Tahiti. Share various personal stories of enlightenment.
This style was exciting when TED got popular a few years ago, but now I find it increasingly annoying. I really miss old meetups where people would just present their open source projects and discuss technical topics. If I go to a Python meetup, I want to perhaps hear about some new cool library you made, not how you learned to play the trumpet.
(I don't mean this as a criticism of this Hacker News meetup - I haven't been to it and perhaps this style fits there. Just a general observation.)
That's pretty much what HN London is. We like to keep the talks as diverse as possible. Everything from local developers building 3D worlds in CSS3D[1] to the creator of Haskell talking about shaping the future of how children learn computing[2].
To add a counterpoint, I, on the other hand, am burnt out on these kinds of meetups. For short 5-10min lightning talks, I think presenting projects or libraries is fantastic for discovery, but longer talks about specific projects bore the hell out of me 9 out of 10 times. I can learn faster in my own time and its difficult to match the topic (and level: beginner? expert?) with the audience.
Visionary talks are harder to miss with and therefore safer bets to not bore me.
Where do you live that you get a lot of TED talks?
The meetup has been running for about 5-6 years now and it's taken a huge amount of time and effort to get it to where it is today. We're incredibly fortunate that there's an amazing amount of interesting people willing to speak at and attend the event.
Next one is likely to be at the end of November.
I agree it was a particular good experience, even with technical issues (no lights for one), it had some really helpful topics and enlightening speakers.
It's always good to hear from real projects about real problems and solutions rather than blog posts which are too often focused on what's best given a perfect environment, not what is realistic.
What are your reference points here? Would love to hear other recommendations of yours.
* With a of noteworthy/critical tech sector
They avoid the overly polished and sometimes sanctimonious TED style. HNLondon feels like an authentic event put together by true technologists for technologists.
Free craft beer and pizza also sweetens the deal :-)
Any advise on how to run it?
Start small. HN London started in someones apartment in London with 10-15 people turning up and grew from there to an average of 400 people attending.
Try to avoid talks that end up being a product pitch.
We did start it a long time ago, but then someone aggressively took over the meetup page, so we're not in control anymore: http://www.meetup.com/parishackers/
We've since started "Paris Tech Talks" in the same spirit, which is now the largest generalist tech meetup in Paris: https://www.meetup.com/Paris-Tech-Talks/
What we've seen over time though is that the Paris tech scene already has a enormous number of high quality meetups, and people are increasingly tired of them. We are seeing the same general decline in interest that happened with hackathons a couple years ago.
I'd say that "Hacker News" is not really a strong enough unique proposition to build a new meetup on. Meetups linked to specific languages or technologies tend to do much better over time.
Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss more!