November Gophers: The Rundown

Last week, we hosted London Gophers at SaltPay! It was their first time hosting a meetup and they smashed it out of the park! We additionally had a first-time speaker who did an absolutely fantastic presentation, I genuinely didn’t realize it was their first-time until after the event.

This ‘rundown’ will be lighter than the last as some points brought up in October’s retrospective are still ongoing and being worked on.

Things That Went Hunky-Dory

Our Adaptability Has Improved

This time round there were several unforeseen circumstances that previously would’ve made it difficult for us to deliver the same quality of meetup. As an example, there were a few WI-FI issues, we forgot to record on zoom, a speaker had a last-minute emergency among a few other things.

However, the processes we had in place and the backup options we’ve been working on still allowed the meetup to go ahead as if nothing had really gone wrong in the background. A real-life ‘chaos engineering’ exercise.

Unexpected events come with the territory of community organization and we hope to take some lessons from this event and continue to improve ourselves.

Got To Shake Of The Speaker Rust Before Next Week

Next week I’m speaking at DevRelCon which is becoming more real-er by the minute. For November Gophers there was a lack of talk submissions, so I put together a brief talk about talks, to inspire those who have thought about speaking, but haven’t applied yet.

It was nice to shake off the Rust, although it was obviously a friendly audience as most knew who I was and so I may not have taken it that seriously, compared to the first talk I ever did at London Gophers. Here’s a link to the talk, if you’re curious.

Things That Went Not-So-Hunky-Dory

We Need A Central Hub For Communications

Right now we’re split across Meetup, Gopher Slack, YouTube and Twitter. With what’s occurred at Twitter it made us realize we’ve been overly reliant on external communication channels for people to know what’s going on at the Meetup.

I think perhaps having a central point and then letting that information fan down to the others sites may be a better approach. It may also make adding to and moving from different social channels easier. In conclusion, we’re going to be refurbishing the gophers.london website.

It uses Hugo, ‘The world’s fastest framework for building websites’, so hopefully it won’t be too tricky to update our website and the information on it.

We’re also updating our banner to include quick links to our website and how to contact us. Below is a mock up of half of the banner. The 2nd half is a secret for now. Anywho, once all the links on the banner actually work, we’ll start to use the banner on our current and future socials.  

That's All for Now

I’m unfortunately going to miss the Go X Rust Christmas Party next week (Team Go RSVP) (Team Rust RSVP), but I’m really looking forward to catching the videos, the talks and Q&A. Luckily, I did get to help out in my own way by creating this:

Have a lovely day and thanks for reading!