Experiences from second meetup in Zurich Clojure User Group

[Thomas G. Kristensen]

Hi all,

We had our second monthly meetup in the Zurich Clojure User Group yesterday evening, and it went great! Fourteen people showed up to show their support, which is pretty good, considering the citys size.

We started out with thanking the hosts (local.ch). I'd prepared some topics we could work with which I wrote up on a whiteboard:

-Get through Quil setup and play around

-Go through some 4Clojure tasks

-Roman literals

-Go through Overtone setup and play around

-Create a "Hello world" web service and deploy it on Heroku

-Implement a REST service using Liberator

-Implement Fibonacci numbers in Clojure using functions and lazy seq

I then asked people to come up with other tasks. I remember the following:

-Examine Datomic

-Examine Hadoop

-Implement an interval abstraction

Next, I asked if everybody would either briefly say what they would like to play with, or if they would rather dot vote. Nobody said anything... so I said we'd dot-vote, as that is less intimidating. Each person was given six points, and asked to place three on one topic, two on another and one on a last topic. The five topics with the most votes (Quil, Overtone, Datomic, Hadoop and the interval) were selected. We picked five places in the room, one for each topic, and asked people to go where they wanted to work. That worked brilliantly! Within 15 minutes music was playing from the Overtone group, the Datomic guys had adopted the Hadoop group and were deep in thought, the Quil people were drawing excitedly and the interval group was working hard on proper abstractions.

We worked for about two hours (19 - 21:30) before people started drifting homewards in the dark Swiss night. People seemed very satisfied with the evening, and claimed to be looking forward to the next meetup.

The dot voting really worked for us. I haven't heard of others using it, but it seemed a natural choice, coming from a scrum house.

Oh, also, I'd brought nuts and clementines, in honour of the season :)

I hope this will serve as inspiration for others.

Next time I was planning to make people do a quick presentation of what they did last time, but I'm afraid that might be too intimidating and time consuming. Any experiences? So much stuff was happening, that I was sad I couldn't be in every group.

Right now we have monthly meetings, but I think people would be up for it being more frequent. What are your experiences?

Thomas