Why there haven't been meetings in a while

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Colin Wheeler

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Aug 10, 2013, 9:25:37 PM8/10/13
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Hello Everyone,

As you may have noticed we haven't had Cocoaheads meetings in a little while. I just want to get straight to the matter and explain why. 

The short answer is burnout.

Like John Siracusa on Hypocritical, doing anything on a constant (or near constant) repeating basis that requires a lot of time to research and put together is not a light task. For Cocoaheads often I have to figure out topics, research them, put together a presentation which usually involves a Keynote deck, and work on example source code demonstrating what you are trying to explain. That is a lot of work to do month after month after month. And this isn't even counting the time spent just trying to make sure we have a room to meet in.

The bare amount of time to prepare a decent presentation is at least 2 weeks. And since this is done in my spare time on evenings & weekends thats a lot of time I am giving to do just this. 

Don't get me wrong, I don't view this as a burden most of the time. I enjoy doing this as it forces me to fully explore areas of a topic I thought I knew everything about and forces me to examine why things work the way they do and come up with answers to possible questions ahead of time. This benefits me and you because we both not only learn about a topic, but also learn why something on iOS or OS X works the way it does.

For me, however I cannot keep doing this, and must stop this now. I am only a person with the same 24 hours a day you have and I want to be able to focus on things I cannot possibly do while also doing Cocoaheads. I only have so much focus I am able to give to so many things, and after a certain point I realized that I had accumulated too many tasks and some things were suffering because I just could not give them the time and attention they deserved.

I really hate doing this, because I fear in doing so that this will likely mean the end of Cocoaheads here in central Iowa and that is the last thing I want to do.

So here we are. If someone is willing to give this the care it needs, I am willing to help in transitioning leadership to someone else. There is a gmail account for email to the group, a google groups mailing list, an account for cocoaheads.org to post meeting details, etc. 

Again please understand this was a very difficult decision for me, i've been thinking for months how I could avoid doing this. In the end, I have only a certain amount of time & focus I can give and no amount of optimizing my schedule and task list is ever going to get around that. 

As for NSCoder Night, because it is an informal gathering I have no problem continuing to do it every week. If people are genuinely interested in bringing it back to Ankeny on a bi-weekly basis I have no problem with this either.

Thank you all for being such great people. Regardless of what happens to Cocoaheads, i think it made us all better Cocoa Developers and I am glad for the time I've had there and for everybody i've meet.

Colin

Shannon Cornish

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Aug 26, 2013, 7:07:17 PM8/26/13
to des-moines...@googlegroups.com
Hi Colin,

I wanted to thank you for your effort and leadership with the Des Moines Cocoaheads group. The quite a lot of effort required to put together a new presentation every month and I'm thankful you lasted as long as you did.

I certainly would be interested in an NSCoder Night in Des Moines/Ankeny but with family commitments I could only manage to get away around once a month.

Regards,
Shannon


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Joel Powers

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Aug 26, 2013, 5:01:27 PM8/26/13
to des-moines...@googlegroups.com, Joel Powers
Colin - Thanks for all you've contributed to this group.  I can tell you put a lot of research and time into your presentations and I've learned a lot.  I understand the preparation time.  I tried to give a talk on Scene kit and just didn't have the time to do a good job.

Unless someone has stepped up, I'd like to reach out to some other groups, see if I can "reboot" this somehow this fall.  Give me a couple months to reach out.

If anyone has any ideas, please post here.

Thanks!
Joel



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