818: CJ × Hosting Meetups - Lunch and Learn
Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats
Wes Bos
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 September 2024
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Summary
In this episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott talk with CJ Reynolds about the resurgence of meetups in a post-COVID world. They discuss the benefits of attending and speaking at meetups, and the logistics of organizing them. CJ also shares his experiences running the DenverScript meetup, including sourcing speakers, finding venues, and ensuring a welcoming community.
Show Notes
- 00:00 Welcome to Syntax!
- 01:35 Brought to you by Sentry.io
- 01:49 CJ’s history hosting meetups
- 06:35 How do you structure a meetup?
- 09:50 How do you raise awareness for a meetup and get people to attend?
- 13:27 How to pay for a meetup
- 15:22 How to get speakers at meetups
- 16:50 The length of these talks
- 17:03 Does live-streaming hurt attendance?
- 19:32 Is there a vetting process for finding speakers?
- 24:26 A meetup doesn’t have to be talks
- 27:48 What’s the worst part about hosting a meetup?
- 29:37 What was your first meetup like?
- 33:27 What’s the best meetup you’ve been to and why?
- 37:10 How to be a good attendee
- 40:45 Are meetups back?
- 44:00 Tips for organizing a great meetup
- 45:29 How to find a meetup
- 47:37 Sick Picks & Shameless Plugs
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Syntax today. We've got an episode for you on hosting meetups. It's good to see. |
| 0:07.6 | Meetups are finally back. I guess they've been back for maybe a year or two, but I feel like the come back of meetups after COVID was very slow. |
| 0:19.2 | And I personally got my start in speaking at meetups. I met tons of really cool people at meetups. |
| 0:25.3 | I can't say enough good things about going to meetups and conferences and actually talking |
| 0:30.8 | tech with people IRL. |
| 0:33.5 | So we've got CJ on today. |
| 0:35.9 | CJ is part of the syntax team. |
| 0:37.7 | What does CJ stand for? |
| 0:38.7 | Do we know that? |
| 0:39.5 | Christopher James? |
| 0:41.5 | Sure, it's whatever you want. |
| 0:42.7 | I don't tell people. |
| 0:44.0 | No? |
| 0:45.0 | All right. |
| 0:46.5 | Cosette junkie. |
| 0:47.8 | He loves Cosette. |
| 0:49.4 | Every single time we have CJ on his byline, we'll do a new a new thing that CJ means. |
| 0:55.0 | I love that. |
| 0:58.0 | So, CJ runs the Denver Script Meet Up, |
| 1:01.0 | and he's here to talk to us all about that and also like I've run a couple |
| 1:04.7 | meetups in my day in the past and we just ran more Ben just ran one last |
| 1:09.4 | week and Century sponsored it as a Toronto Dev Tools meet-up, which was really cool. |
... |
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