Last week, a couple of friends and I made a little trip to Vienna to attend the local JavaScript usergroup meetup. Luckily, Netconomy also has an office there so working remotely while still being at an office wasn’t an issue 😉 So after a couple of hours in a train on Wednesday morning and work we went to Sektor5, a co-working space space with its own bar to attend the ViennaJS meetup for July.
When you enter Sektor5, the first and only thing you see is that bar, but behind a little door is a huge office space which is also where the actual meetup was hosted. Moving a couple dozen chairs together and a couple tables out and we had ourselves a nice presentation area. Relaxed, spacious, and comfortable with a decent projector. What more do you need?!
Talks; there were three of those that evening: One about Dart by Sebastian Göttschkes of Blossom, one about VueJS by Roman Kuba from Codeship, and one about building chat bots by Klemens Zleptnig from creative workline. Personally, the latter two were the most interesting to me simply because I really don’t want to get into Dart right now. VueJS, on the other hand, looks like a nice framework to at least give a try and Klemens mentioned tons of services and libraries I might eventually use for something. Wit.ai and especially the new natural language toolkit within the Google Cloud looks quite interesting for things like bots and 😊
There was also a nice time-limit of 20min on the talks enforced by the Franz Enzenhofer, the organiser and event host. That limit really kept the pace high and the event lively despite the late hour.
That’s also the main reason I went there: Seeing how other people organise meetups: What locations do they choose, how is sponsoring handled, what formats do they use. Sure, organising a meetup in Graz where you can expect up to 20 or 30 people to one in Vienna such as ViennaJS, where you get at least twice that attendance. Still, some traits I definitely would like to copy in the future. I really liked the moderation style as well as having an organisational talk at the very beginning. I might try that one this Tuesday at PyGRAZ if time permits 😉
A big thank-you to the local team for having us!
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