Meetups are a remarkably easy and convenient way to connect and network with others.  Today on the show, Charles shares his various strategies on how to make the most of Meetups, whether to network to find a better job, learn something new, collaborate with others, get counsel about your career or current work problems, or simply enjoy the human connection and community with others.

Charles Max_Wood:

Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of Adventures in Angular. This week I'm your host Charles Max Wood. Sorry, I've got a little bit of a scratchy voice, but I'm going to talk today about going to meetups and how to take advantage of them. Now I'm going to take a little bit different tactic than you've probably heard in the past. And the reason is because I've been interacting with all kinds of people. about how to stay current, how to find a better job and things like that. And I tell them to go to meetups, but then when they start looking, one of two things happens. Either they're in an area where there is a meetup, but they haven't met for a while because of COVID. And for whatever reason, the folks that ran it haven't brought it back yet, basically. And so they're kind of out there thinking, well, it'd be, it should be nice to meet up with people, but I don't know how to run a meetup. And I could coach people through that. And I'm planning on making a course for that on top end devs, but in the meantime, they're just kind of stuck, right? Cause they don't know who was involved. They don't know how to get people together. They don't know, you know, kind of the fundamentals of how to do it. And it's, it's not that it's difficult. It's mostly just that they don't, know the people to pull in to make it successful and to get more people there. So they're kind of stuck out there. So I'm gonna be putting together some online meetups. And just to give you kind of an idea of what that involves, I am looking for people who want to come and do a presentation at them, right? It's a low key presentation. It's not like a conference. We're doing conferences too and you can speak at those. And feel free, you know, even if you're not sure that you're qualified. We'll figure that out. But we usually have a couple of speakers. Often we'll have a sponsor that'll come and talk to us for five minutes about, hey, I'm hiring, or hey, I'm this, or hey, I'm that. And then come check out our tool. Here's a two minute demo on what we do kind of thing, right? So we have the sponsor message, we have a couple of talks, and then the real meet, the real payoff for meetups is that you get to meet other people, right? You get to talk to other people who are out there doing what you're doing. They're in the thick of it day in and day out, and you can get some advice maybe on your career, you can get some advice on the things that you're struggling with at work. Now, when I say that, it sounds like the people issues, the other, the non-technical things. But I've seen people get technical problems solved too, where they show up at a meetup and they start chatting and they go, oh, well, I've been dealing with this problem at work where this, I just can't get this feature to come together and somebody will say. oh, did you know there's a library for that? Or, hey, we solved that and we used this, this, and this, and if you tie them together this way, it, you know, and so there's a lot to be gained by it, but the other thing is, is that the first, probably four or five programming jobs that I ever got were jobs that I got essentially because I either knew somebody from the meetups or I had somebody who would vouch for me from the meetups, right? I started going to the meetups, the first job I got, I got off a job board. And the next one too, but after that it was because I knew people and you know I found contracts because I was showing up at the meetups I found other work because I was showing up at the meetups and so I want to talk through what that looks like You know just kind of get into you know what what is it? What do you do? You know, how does it all work and Maybe a little bit of how to organize them yourself since I've done that too So let's start at the beginning and let's say that you've never been to one, right? Just so that we can kind of set the stage. Yeah, I know some of you are old hat at this and you've been in a position where you've attended them or run them or whatever. But what I'm finding is that there are a lot of people who have never been to a meetup before. So typically what happens, and I'm just going to be thinking about some of the ones that I've been to here, I've been to some Just to back up for a second, where they usually held, I've been to a couple of them that are held at colleges. The college provides the room and the projector, and so you can go and you can be in there. One of them was at the entrepreneurial building at a local college. And so it was kind of more hosted by them. They kind of opened that space up to any professional groups that want to come in. that have ties to the entrepreneurial community and it's not that much of a leap to bring in a programming group to use that space because often the startups that are working in that entrepreneurial space are actually looking for developers. And so it's not that much of a stretch. And then yesterday actually. So I had some folks at a company reach out to me and they're looking for an extremely senior Ruby on Rails developer, which is something that I'm definitely qualified for. I spend most of my time writing Rails these days. And they just wanted to talk and get to know me a little bit and they were asking how to, hey, eventually we want a team of five to seven elite. Ruby on Rails developers, right? And so how do you build that team? And what I told them was is that their best bet was to actually start hosting the meetups. And they're down in the south part of Utah County. And so the other thing that that helps them with is that most of the meetups that I've attended, even in Utah County are on the north end, right? So it's already a half hour plus drive for most of the folks down there. to come up and be at a meetup. And so, you know, you set something up down there, you're gonna recruit people. You're gonna get people who don't wanna commute all the way up here, who are happy to work down there, who, you know, are terrific Rails developers. You know, you get the idea, right? I think the farthest south is Provo, which really isn't that far from where they're at. They're in Springville, but which is the next town south from Provo. But yeah, it just... You know, you think about it and it's like, okay, you know, that's a terrific way to recruit. So, um, you, you may be able to get your employer to host, uh, the meetup, right? Hey, can we use the conference room every second Thursday of the month? Um, but anyway, so, so I've been to them at companies. I've been to them at restaurants, right? Where people are just like, Hey, we reserved a big long table at, you know, the local, uh, steak and ribs place. And. you know, or the local, you know, kind of casual cafe. And, you know, we're all just going to be there and we're just going to talk code. Right. And I've actually put things out there and said, Hey, I'm going to be at Starbucks from this time to this time. Right. And so then I go get a hot chocolate. You know sit in there and if no one shows up I just work but you know I usually had a few people show up and so you kind of get the idea that it it's it's a lot more low-key Than conference, but you also have the opportunity to go and interact with folks on kind of a more personal basis, right? So even if you have a presenter, speaker, or coach, or somebody there who's gonna help people through stuff, you're gonna be talking to them more on the level of, hey, we're both programmers and let's talk about something we love, right? So just to give you an idea, so you usually show up if it's at a cafe or something, you know, everyone... may just gather around somebody's computer and then you just sit down and watch them do their thing. And I've seen that, I've seen them break out into groups doing that where, you know, basically somebody showed up with a couple of extra monitors and so, you know, people can crowd around behind the person, look over their shoulder or, you know, the monitor's pointed off the other direction and so they can sit in front of the monitor and see what they're doing, right, and have them walk through what they're doing. You know, there are a lot of ways to do it, but effectively what you're doing is you're having somebody share their expertise. And then afterward, you know, everybody sits and chats. And so that's where a lot of the rest of it comes in, because if you're looking for a job, it's very natural to ask people, hey, where do you work and what do you do there? Right. What kind of contributions do you make it work? What? you know, what problems are you trying to solve? What issues are you running into? What interesting, you know, takes on Angular or whatever other technology you're using? Do you all have, right? And then, you know, what stack do you have on the back end? You know, how do you communicate? Is it over web sockets? You know, are you using... you know, other technologies to kind of enhance things, you know, are you up on the latest version? And as you have these conversations, it starts opening up opportunities for you to get to know them, but it also opens up opportunities for you to get to know the technology better. And so you will have this technical skill growth that comes out of the meetups, but you're also going to run into opportunities to build relationships. And as I said before, those relationships are a big part of what has helped me over the years, find jobs, find work, find contracts, et cetera. So it kind of serves both. And then if you're looking for a job, you can start asking questions about. how they operate and things like that to find out if they're the kind of place you wanna work at, right? So you can find out how their benefits are, you can start finding out if their boss is awesome or if their boss is not as awesome, if they're hiring on that team, and you can open up opportunities that way. So. there's just a ton, a ton that you can get out of the meetups. And you start to build this community in whatever area you're in to gain those kinds of opportunities. And then out of those groups, a lot of times you'll have a handful of people that will want to run a local conference or things like that, right? So there are other things that will grow out of that naturally that are really, really cool. That's what happened here, right? So the local Angular community, there were a handful of guys that wanted to run an Angular conference. And yeah, it's the one you're thinking about, because I live near Salt Lake. And those five guys started EngiConf, right? And four of them still run it. And so, you know. That came out of the local community here, right? People who were doing JavaScript in Angular, and it turns into that kind of an opportunity. They were on adventures in Angular for a long time. If you go listen to the early episodes, two or three of those guys were on here all the time as regular panelists. Right. And now I think they have their own podcast and their own kind of media arm out of NGConf. Right. And so some of that can grow out of that community as well. In fact, they were the ones that got me to start this show in the first place. And so you really kind of get the idea that this can turn into a lot of different things. Now, I want to talk a little bit about the online meetups, right? Because you're probably thinking, OK, well, how do you get that face to face interaction at an online meetup? And no matter how you cut it, it's not going to be the same. I'm just going to say, right? But at the same time, what I'm doing is I'm using a system called Air Meet. And what Air Meet does is it does the presentation piece, right? So they do online conferences on it. They do, but they also do just kind of show up and chat, meet and greet kind of stuff, right? So you can actually set things up on Air Meet so that. So you can set things up on Air Meet such that there are basically tables for networking, right? And so people can sit at the table and join a video chat and talk to each other. And like I said, it's not quite the same as being in the same room and talking to somebody face to face, but it's pretty darn good for just being able to sit down and have kind of an informal chat, right? I think when we try and have some kind of like meeting over those kinds of things, like where it's an actual meeting, you know, like a work meeting over Zoom. I've seen some of those work really well and some of them not work really well. And a lot of times you kind of have to find a rhythm that's different from a face-to-face. But what I found is if you're just kind of sitting around and chatting and BSing with each other, and I do this with a number of groups, then you... You can mostly fall into kind of a conversational rhythm. You can just talk, you know, you get to know each other, you can figure out where people are at. Same kind of thing, the difference is, is that, you know, when you're done, you just sign off instead of getting in your car and driving home, right? And there's no way you're gonna get together for lunch unless you actually meet somebody who lives close to you. So there still is that aspect, right? And if they work at a company that wants you to be in their local area and you can't or aren't willing to move, It may be a deal killer if you're looking for another job. But beyond that, you really get the opportunity to interact with all kinds of people. And the nice thing is that what I found is that the people who are really invested in Angular or in other technologies, they're the ones that show up to these things. And so you kind of get a little bit more cream of the crop when you're dealing with. when you're getting in and chatting with people, right? Because these are the people that are willing to take time out of their day, or out of their week, or out of their month to go to something where they're gonna get trained, they're gonna be able to talk to people, they're gonna be able to interact, they're gonna get some form of interaction out of it. And so at that point, you know, you're really getting from the meetup what you want. And since you're not limited by location anymore, it's not the elite people in your local area, it's elite people anywhere. And the other thing that that does is it also opens us up for presenters from anywhere, right? So we could conceivably get members of the Angular core team, or we could get people who have left the Angular core team, you know, who are working on other stuff like, you know, the folks over at NX or, or narwhal, sorry, or, you know, things like that, right? We can get some of the experts who are going to be presenting on how to do a thing at ng-conf. You know, we can talk to some doing interesting stuff that you may have never heard of before. But we have all kinds of opportunities to bring in the top folks there too. We can also reach out to people who aren't necessarily going to come talk to us about Angular, but are going to come talk to us about skill sets that we need. Maybe we get Bob Martin or- Kent Beck or somebody like that to come in and talk to us about agile development or, you know, maybe we get somebody to come in and talk about hosting and deployment, right? Or we get somebody from Netlify or Versel to come in and talk to us about what they're doing over there and you know, how it applies to what you're doing with your stuff, right? Uh, we get somebody from Scully, right? To come in and talk about that. And so anyway, there there's just any number of things that we can do that can open those learn from people who are experts that are anywhere in the world. And so I'm really looking forward to making this work just from that standpoint because there are a lot of terrific people. And we get them on the show and we kind of do an interview with them, but I want you all to be able to interact with them too and to start building relationships with them as well. And so I'm looking to open it up and just let that happen. Now I'm going to start scheduling these in August. So if you go to topendevs.com slash meetups. You can find them and you can sign up for them. And then the recordings will be available as part of a Top Endevs membership. So, you know, if you miss it, sorry. But, you know, make sure you make it to the next one. And yeah, anyway, I'm really, really looking forward to it. Now, as far as how you get the most out of meetups, here are some tips that I have for that. Because at the end of the day, there are all kinds of benefits and if you know what you want, then it makes it a whole lot easier to get what you need from the meetups. So the first thing that I recommend that most people do is just sit down and figure out what trajectory you want your career to be on. Now for a lot of people they just don't know and they're not sure how exactly to pull that together, and that's fine. The reason I tell you to do that is because it helps you figure out what that next step needs to be. career trajectory to look like this, and it doesn't look like my current company is going to help me with that. So my next step is move to a company that's going to help me with that. Or I'm an expert in this area, and the next logical progression for me is to learn this other area of Angular that we don't really use. Maybe it's to learn a related technology like Nest.js. Or maybe it's. to go find a job where you can be a team lead, right? So there are all kinds of things, but if you know what that next step is, then you can actually come to the meetup with. the idea in mind of, okay, who do I need to meet? Who do I need to talk to? What questions do I need answered? What kind of, you know, 10 minutes of coaching is gonna help me do that, right? So if you wanna become the team lead but you don't wanna move, you know, move jobs, then maybe it's, okay, well, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna just ask, right? I'm gonna ask at the meetup. Afterward, at one of the tables, I'm gonna be like, hey, look, this is where I'm at. I want to be the team lead. up, how do I convince them to hire me to do it? Then people will throw all kinds of ideas at you. Or maybe it's, hey, I want to learn Nest.js, and so you show up and you start talking to people even though there wasn't a presentation on Nest.js. We talked about other stuff. We talked about routing or something. You can come and you can actually talk to people and you can say, hey, I feel like the next big step for me is to learn Nest.js. You know. anyone here doing it, do you have any recommendations, are there courses you like, right? And then you can, again, you can get that kind of feedback and then you have basically an idea of what to do for the next month and then you can come back and you get more feedback again. And so there's all kinds of stuff that you can do like that when you show up. So if you know what those next steps are and you know what you need to learn, then you can show up and you can do it. The other thing that you can do is you can also reach out to the person organizing it and you can say, hey, I realized that the next step for me is to become a team lead. And I was wondering if you could put together a presentation or have somebody come that can do a presentation on how to get promoted to team lead in your company. And so maybe we do that on Adventures or maybe we do that or the Angular Meetup or maybe we do that on the on the Top End Devs Meetup, right? And so then you get an email back from me that says, hey, you know, we cover career stuff over on the Top End Devs show. and I'll put together an episode about that now so that you can get your question answered. And then, yeah, I'll find somebody who can do that presentation, or I can do that presentation, right? Because I've done that a handful of times, and so I know what that takes, right? And so we can start to address that, right? But maybe it's, hey, I'm really struggling with these concepts around routing. Okay, well, I'm gonna go find somebody who can explain the routing to you, right? Maybe I'm not the best person to explain that to you. Maybe there's somebody in the community who can do that. I can go figure out who that is. I probably know a couple of people that are more than qualified to do it. And you know, we make that connection come together. You know, we make that happen. And so at the end of the day, that's the other thing is if you're communicating with the organizer you can get the kinds of presentations you want and you can start to drive some of that content so that it turns into what you need it to be. And overall, I mean, that just... that opens up all kinds of stuff and makes a whole lot of things happen for you. But then when you show up, you know, you can carry on further conversation afterward at one of those tables and say, Hey, that presentation on becoming a team lead, that was awesome. And it really helped. And then somebody else may say, yeah, and my experience was a little different. And here's, you know, here's what I saw. And then, Hey, it turns out that, you know, all this stuff kind of comes together to get you what you need. And so, um, Like I said, if you go to topendevs.com slash meetups, you can get all that stuff to connect and make some magic happen in your career. If you want to get a text and you're in the US, you want to know about this and about some of the other things that we have going on, you can also send a text, just 877-3287. That's a US number. So if you're not in the US... I'm not sure exactly how that works for you. I'm pretty sure it works in US and Canada. It's a texting service. So I get the texts, but if you try and call the number, you're just gonna get a voicemail that says, I don't answer this number. But if you text me, then I can text you back. And if you text meetups, then it will actually put you in the list so that we know to send you information when we have meetups scheduled. So... Anyway, that's just another way that we can kind of open the door to a lot of that and start making this happen. But I'd love to get your feedback. I'd love to hear what you're working on, what you're trying to do with your career, where you're trying to get to with things. I do offer coaching if that's interesting or you can just, you know, you can text to that number. You know, and if you text, like I said, 801-877. 3 2 8 7 and just let me know where you're at then I'm happy to respond and You know be on top of that for you Anyway, I'm gonna move move into picks. You know have a whole lot more that I wanted to talk about here so this is gonna be kind of short, but There you go now for for picks I usually pick a board game But I've been pretty heads down building out things for top end devs A lot of it's around the podcast, some of it's around sponsorships. If you or your company is hiring, that sponsorship on that meetup is probably your best bet because we'll get you in front of a whole bunch of people. So if somebody wants to connect with that, you can go ahead and go to topendevs.com slash sponsor and if you click on any of the buttons that say let's talk or get a quote, you'll It'll take you to a scheduling link where we can get on and talk about sponsorship. So if you're hiring, let me know and we'll figure that out. One other thing that I'm going to pick, and this is a tool that I have set up on Top End Dev, it's called Paper Cups. Now I tend to be a little bit slow. Like I got a message from somebody about one of the episodes they were having problems with on top end house on paper cups and I didn't see it for 12 hours, right? So I responded but I don't think they were there anymore. But I'm really digging it and it's kind of a chat slash you know whatever. And so if you know if I'm on and I see your your chat come in, then we might be able to chat that way too. There's also a Slack channel. If you go to any of the Adventures in Angular chats or episodes, you can click on Join Our Community, and it'll take you to Slack. So those are just some ways that I want to connect with you, and I'm going to shout them out. I'm also going to pick a TV show. and I think I may have picked this on the show before. I was watching Yellowstone really, really dig in Yellowstone. It's a phenomenal show. I mean, I can't sign off on hardly any of the behavior in the show, but you know, it's really interesting to watch all of the intrigues in defending that ranch. So I'm gonna pick Yellowstone, but I'm picking it because I've been watching 1883, which is the prequel. to Yellowstone and you know it's... You know, it's got Tim McGraw and Faith Hill in it, which is fun because I've been a fan of Tim McGraw forever. You know, I've been listening to his music for 20-30 years. But anyway... Such a good show. I think it's better than Yellowstone, to be honest, which is... Anyway, I still need to watch the last episode, so no spoilers. I think the girl in it's gonna die, but I don't actually know that. Um, but anyway, so yeah, so I really enjoyed the show. Um, the actress that's in that, she was in run, hide, fight, and a couple of other things that I've seen and I've liked her in pretty much everything I've seen her in. So, so that's been great as well. And then, you know, Sam Elliott, he's been terrific in it as well. And so, um, overall I'm really, really enjoying the show. So I'm going to pick 1883. I have a Peacock Plus subscription and so we're going to be looking at that. And then I've also been looking at getting, and I really love soccer, I love watching soccer and I'm not sure exactly who's going to have World Cup where we can watch it. I think it was Fox Sports last time I watched World Cup. and i think i would i think it was ladies world cup that i watched i can't remember anyway uh... but i'm looking at getting in the espn plus subscription uh... because the women's u a pha uh... that's the european soccer organization they're they're having their big tournament right now uh... i'm pretty sure that italy is out i was really lived in italy for two years uh... So I always root for them, and then I usually root for England and France, just because that's where my family is from, at least on my mom's side. My grandpa, his parents immigrated from England and my grandmother actually immigrated herself. She was immigrated from France. So I always root for them just because I feel like I have some ties there. But yeah, so I'm looking forward to watching some soccer and enjoying some of that. So I'm going to pick that as well. And then... I think that's it. I think that's all I've got as far as picks go. But like I said, go check out topendevs.com slash meetups. If you want to sponsor or let us know that you're hiring top end devs.com sponsor And then you can also text me and you can text me at 801 877 3287 I'll make sure that that's on the website somewhere so that you can get it. I'm looking at putting together some sort of everyday Texts that you would get that would effectively remind you hey, you know do this to level up and but I haven't gotten that together yet So I'm also looking at doing an email course that is kind of the same thing, right, that walks you through that. Then we'll have actual courses on Top End Devs. I need to flesh out the course functionality a little bit more on Top End Devs before we do that, but that's where we're headed from there. But definitely go check out topendevs.com slash meetups. And yeah, that's it. I'm going to wrap it up here. Until next time, folks, Max out.