The Akka experiment

[Lutz Hühnken (Hamburg Akka Meetup)]

Hi, user group organizers,

this may be slightly off-topic, but I wanted to let you know about a little experiment we do in Hamburg, Germany: we started an Akka user group.

A little "historic" background: When Markus Jura (of Typesafe) gave a "Going reactive with Java 8" talk for the Hamburg Java User Group, a lot of people expressed an interest in Akka. We realized that many of them would not come to the Scala user group, as they have reasons to stick with Java (either personal unwillingness to switch to another language just yet, or - more often - constraints in the workplace). So Markus and I thought we'd start up an Akka group and see if we get some people to join that were so far left out.

That was 7 weeks ago. During this time, already 94 people joined the group http://www.meetup.com/Hamburg-Akka-Meetup/ on meetup.com.

About 1/3rd of them showed up at the first meeting last week, were Markus gave a great introductory talk about Akka:

http://www.meetup.com/Hamburg-Akka-Meetup/events/184307022/

It was quite amazing to see how motivated the people were to learn more: After the talk, we had some beers and pizza in the hall, and said we would later go back to the meeting room and talk about ideas for future events. I expected that most people would leave at that point, but at least 2/3rds stayed on and suggested topics for future meetings, with some also volunteering as speakers right away. Interests included reactive streams, comparison with Rx[Java|Scala], and migrating "enterprisey" architectures that rely on distributed transactions to an async world. We assembled a little list here:

https://github.com/hamburg-akka-meetup/docs/blob/master/meetups-planning.md

The next meeting is already scheduled to take place right after the summer vacation period:

http://www.meetup.com/Hamburg-Akka-Meetup/events/193570872/

One think to consider of course is that we also have a Scala user group and a Play user group in the city. We don't want to hurt them or compete with them! There is some skepticism there that the user group space becomes to fragmented, but I think we can work things out. For example, we had already planned a "Building a reactive app with Play and Akka" workshop. We then talked with the Play user group about it and decided to do it together - now it will technically be a meetup of the Play user group, which we will also promote it in the Akka group.

The bottom line of it all - a lot of people come to the Scala community by taking a little "detour" via Akka or Play. It might be interesting to you that these topics might attract many people that would not have considered the Scala user group the right place for them so far. Maybe it is not necessary to form separate groups, but why not have meetings with introductions to these technologies for people without Scala knowledge? That may even be something to be done in Java user groups.

Lutz 

(Hamburg Akka Meetup, Hamburg, Germany)

(Trainer & Consultant @ Typesafe)