Hi all,
The Julia Users Berlin Group have two meet-ups planned between now and Christmas.
The first will be on November 7th, where we will hear about an automated transport map generation tool.
The second will be in early-mid December, where we will discuss using the GPU from Julia.
Please sign-up on our Meet-up page if you’re coming. It makes managing access to the building much easier.
Hope to see you there!
David.
[unrelated] How did you guys build a Julia group? I’d love to do the same here in the South of Sweden.
Us Swedes / people located in Sweden need to organize better. There are a few of us in the #sverige channel on slack.
I would say that it’s not easy to get a Julia meet-up off the ground, but hopefully getting easier.
We were at a regular attendance of 12-15 people in the Summer. That’s from a population of 4.5 million in Berlin.
I would say that regularity is important, and showing that you are planning on keeping this going. These are important signals to people that they can rely on you and commit some of their limited time to attending your event. We went with a bi-monthly schedule for this reason.
Our biggest difficulties:
I could gripe that people who like Julia tend to be quiet and less interested in attending events. But actually I think that this is a wrong characterisation. People who like Julia are, perhaps, more introverted. But we try to provide a safe space where if they attend once they’re interested in coming again. Normally this works out. But given that Berlin is a very socially oriented town it’s hard to get people to come in the first place.
Btw, if anyone in Berlin wants to comment on how we can improve things we’d really welcome the feedback.
The other small issue is that Julia has been changing at an incredible rate these past few years. We’ve had many people attend say 2 times, but when they hear both times that new breaking changes have been made to the language they tell us they’ll be back if it finally takes off but not before.
In terms of getting started, decide on a location and time, announce it widely (here, any mailing lists), and don’t be discouraged if it’s slow to take off. You want to build something that’s self sustaining, not become the event organiser to a one-off mega-show.
David
I feel like most of our attendees are novice users of Julia, or even just curious software developers who have never tried it before. That would also explain that they don’t return to another meeting, or that it is rather difficult to find new speakers ;-).
EDIT: That observation motivated us to provide a kind of beginners workshop. Something like this actually happened on this years PyData event and we had a strong attendance. Unfortunately, we did not have a next meeting scheduled by then and could not advertise well…