Planning an Engineering Meetup

Ensuring your technical attendees are prepared to hit the ground running ahead of time.

Meetups for engineers, set about a week in advance, can be a great way to ensure that the day of, you have a crack team of people who know what to expect, and who can help other engineers figure out how to find where they fit in these org projects. An engineer meetup can be a great place to:

• Set up repos, Heroku instances, refresh on old skills, or learn about developer tools that can make the weekend work easier.

• Learn about intersectional issues in tech products and events, with a guided discussion by a meetup leader on ex: accessibility in design.

• Invite participating orgs to do a meet and greet, and talk live about their work and needs.

• Collaborate on writing a set of guiding code principles that can be distributed to all participants.

Remember, engineers are critical but a good balance of attendees is needed. I always find us short on front-end eng, designers, copywriters (don’t forget, engineers hate writing copy, help them!) and people to help do research to answer questions about an issue as they come up, and help put together final presentations. There is space and need for everyone’s work.