Having recently realised that writing is something that I need to do to publish my ideas I found myself spending my Tuesday lunch time at the Codebar festival.
When you start writing you should treat it like a hobby and a pleasureable thing to do, in fact if it isn’t I don’t think I will be even able to start and definitely not be able to conintue. This rings true and I am ready to start writing and getting my voice heard. You can use a blog pattern to help focus on what you might write about, e.g I found a thing, Today I learned, Compare and contrast, How I solved a problem. Start by writing an initial draft, refine it later. Then start with am abstract and then work on the structure (beginning, middle and end).
We were introduced to Markdown to write out blog in. This feels nice and simple to use, and not too disctracting either. We were advised too not to use AI to much as it can take our own voise away.
I am really interested in writing and now I feel empowered to start. What do you blog about and are their any blog camps people meet up and write together virtually?
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Last week, I went to the HuddleHive Women In Tech Hackathon held at Accurx.
I attended the same event last year and won first place in the topic challenge. Participating in a hackathon is a fun yet nerve-wracking experience, but since it was my second time, I knew what to expect.
This year, my goal was to meet many people and enjoy the experience!
In the hackathon, you find out the challenge topic at the beginning of the event.
I initially planned to build my blog with python + flask the language and framework I’m most familiar with. However, this came with a lot of caveats especially in deployment. Issues I want to write about: GitHub Pages won't work for it—GitHub Pages only hosts "static" files (HTML/CSS/JS), while Flask needs a "live" Python server to handle the logic and database.
I didn’t want to pay for something like a blog within my website, especially as it’s already built with github pages and deployed for free. So I went down a rabbit hole seeing how I can implement a blog on my website without needing to pay for additional deployment.
I can use something like flask freeze
Astro is js based and i felt like it was a large heavy framework, it’s powerful and great but i was very much not familiar with JS or it’s library, i wanted to build this rapidly within a day or a weekend at the most, the rapid pace at which ruby and jekyll allow me to develop was such
Ruby + Jekyll and uses markdown
Hugo which is Go based
Why I picked Jekyll and ruby
The ruby syntax is almost child like and very similar to python, furthermore the gem system is incredibly simple and easy for an absolute amateur or someone who isn’t familiar with the ruby frameworks. Furthermore, ruby syntax is so python that a Pythonista can rapidly pick it up and start working.
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I’ve been told stories about jinn for as long as I can remember.
Family friends would complain of having to move house due to the racket in the attic, causally remarking, with complete seriousness, that the jinn didn’t want them there. I was told that whenever I was tempted to do something bad, it was actually because jinn were whispering in my ear.
But I’ve learned that jinn are far more than something to blame for bumps in the night. The origins of jinn are laid out in the Quran (although they existed in folklore before its revelation) - a people created from fire long before humans, who mismanaged the Earth, caused calamities and so were banished to the realms of the unseen. They are not evil, and not good either; they are free sprits, with the potential to shift allegiances and act as they wish. They are the central Asian equivalent of fairies, and are even called ‘paris’ in Iran where they have long been lauded in Persian poetry.
To summarise just a few of the game-inspiring qualities of jinn:
I want to give players the opportunity to play as a jinni - to put themselves in their fiery, ethereal shoes.
]]>Welcome to my first blog post
London
]]>In this blog I’ll be talking about my favourite place in the world (with no exaggeration): EMF Camp! I’ll be digging into what EMF camp is, some of my favourite parts, and why I think you should go to.
EMF Camp (Electromagnetic Field) is a 4 day long festival of hackers, makers, and creatives in Hertfordshire featuring workshops, live music, and a wonderful community.
I think you should go to EMF because if you enjoy making, coding, music, and whimsical adventure it’s a great time. More than that though I think the community at EMF is amazing and hopefully you can now see why it’s one of my favourite places.
]]>Reading the slides out loud helps a lot - try to go somewhere quiet, I get embarassed by this if someone is listening.
Once you’ve got some slides, try actually presenting them to someone. This does a couple of things:
(I do both of these! Still, after lots of years of doing this)
I like to move a chair, or something.
And it really helps to plug in your laptop early in the day an convince yourself the slides do come up on the screen!
]]>This week I went to the Codebar Festival, a hybrid event bringing together both coaches and students from the codebar community for workshops and talks.
codebar is a charity that helps under represented groups enter the tech industry though workshops and events like the festival.
At the festival I was hoping to learn more about Javascript as I’m pursuing a career in web app development.
The Javascript workshop was really interesting, I particular like the quiz covering all the weird behaviors of this.
I’ve covered the basic of Javascript before but it was useful to look into some best practices whilst coding a little fizz buzz app.
I hadn’t heard of Deno (node spelled backwards!) before this workshop. It was eye opening learning about different JavaScript runtimes and it was a lot of fun building the dinosaur jumping game.
I really enjoyed going to the codebar Festival and I learned heaps. I got major FOMO because some of the JavaScript sessions were at the same time but I guess I can watch the recordings later.
If you’re trying to learn JavaScript like me I’d definitely recommend checking out codebar!
]]>What do you need in an ‘all rounder’ city bike, I mean what do you really need? For me it’s always been finding that balance between comfort, speed, and the ability to carry whatever random object that you’re required to take from The Shire to Mordor. Ask for the best bike for this type of environment and you’ll get a thousand answers, that I can guarantee. Some swear by a regular roadie, fast and narrow to weave through traffic, others take the hybrid option to get the best of both worlds. Mountain bikes are favoured by those who live in the city’s outskirts, and those who need a bike but aren’t cyclists opt for a dutch bike or an e-bike.
Now, the real heavy hitter is a single speed, or perhaps even a fixed gear. They offer the best running for the least maintenance, the lowest chance of being angle grinded off a bollard, and they make you look cool (if it’s fixed that is). However, whilst they have a relativley low barrier to entry in the city centre, a single gear becomes sluggish to most in the suburbs, and riding fixed comes with its own tribe of mustache donning weirdos ranting to you about gear ratios. So what IS the best choice?
A strong 90’s steel mountain bike steel frame, wide comfortable tires and flat handlebars, gears aplenty, multiple cargo mounting points, a small community, and drip beyond measure. A cafe crusier offers a very strong frame, typically unique enough that re-selling a stolen frame is a highly risky business. Gearing and flat bars means you’re set for whatever errand you and your steed must carry out, and ultimatley they are a huge canvas for creative expression. Now, if you were to go and search for a Cafe Crusier set to buy, your eyes may bleed a little but ! Fear not, for a cafe cruiser is nought but an £80 second hand frame with a £15 basket smashed on the front. I’d suggest trawling some enthusiasts like BabyLondonBikes for info, and have a peek for old Raleigh, Giant, and Trek bikes on ebay/facebook. Happy hunting !
]]>I’ve spent a lot of time and energy this year complaining about Meetup (at the CodeBar Festival Fringe, at PyCon UK, and on my blog). Meetup is becoming more expensive, less reliable, and generally ‘enshittified’ which came to a head at the beginning of this year when AI Signals, a community I organise through Meetup saw a marked drop in attendance.
The thesis of my “Meetup is Terrible Now” talk was that reducing reliance on Meetup could help with declining attendance and the burden of organising events - rather than just speculating about this though I actually followed my own advice to see if it would work in practice.
Meetup as a platform provides network effects that drive attendance, tooling for managing RSVPs and community membership, and has good SEO for discoverability via search (in part because of their capturing of the “Meetup” namespace). Any solution to my problem must still have these things to be a meaningful Meetup alternative.
Some potential solutions I proposed were:
Each has their own merits and issues but my hope was that in combination these three solutions might be enough to break from dependence on Meetup.
What I didn’t cover in my talk was metrics of the success of these solutions which are an important part of any initiative like this, in the end I tracked the following metrics before and after embarking on this experiment:
Working with my friend and former colleague Steve Morris, we rebranded AI Signals from AIDLE (AI and Deep Learning for Enterprise) and launched our own website. We were hugely lucky to have support from Steve (you can read more about the strategy and brand work we did with Steve over on his blog here) and as you’ll see this was one of the most impactful actions in this initiative, but I ran out of steam before successfully implementing POSSE for AI Signals. Starting my new role at Aiven meant I no longer had time for larger infrastructure efforts so setting up POSSE was put on hold.
We set up a Luma calendar and started cross promoting events from Meetup there. We also embedded Luma as the registration system for events in our website with a view to encourage our audience to move to Luma from Meetup.
Additionally we worked with other technical communities in London like Women in Data to co-host and cross promote events.
The rebrand was enormously successful - at the first event after the rebrand we had a turnout of 55 people, more than double the attendance of the previous event at which we only had 20 people.
This increase in attendance has been lasting - we now see an average of 53 attendees at each event post rebrand. We also had several new organisers join, growing our team from 3 to 10 people. Anecdotally, some cited the new brand as sparking their interest in getting involved. We also saw an increase in submissions to our call for papers and three new sponsors engaging with us.
Promoting events in parallel on Luma contributed to some net new RSVPs in this time, it’s hard to say by exactly how much though as we don’t register attendees on the door so we don’t know exactly how many people attend a given event from Meetup vs Luma. With that said though since we started promoting events on Luma 32% of our total RSVPs have been from Luma.
Our event in collaboration with Women in Data had an above average attendance compared to other post rebrand events. I don’t have good data on referrals from cross promotion from other communities but we have seen a lot of new faces since we started collaboration with other groups. We also worked with the Civo team to promote their Civo navigate event and in exchange they helped us out with some free venue use.
Both our audience and audience growth remain concentrated on Meetup. We now have 4,084 members there versus only 236 on Luma. I had hoped to pull the plug on our Meetup page at the end of this year but as it stands I won’t be able to do that - the network effects there remain too strong to leave on the table for now.
Whilst the new brand and our website was extremely impactful, building a website with SquareSpace added additional costs in the form of a £204 a year Squarespace subscription and £16 a year for domain registration. Squarespace is a powerful tool but many of the features that would help us in our efforts to move off Meetup such as managing mailing lists and sending mass emails are paywalled. In the long run I’d like us to migrate off Squarespace to avoid trading one bad platform for another.
We didn’t have as many opportunities to collaborate and for cross promotion with other communities as I would have liked. We started providing a slot in our event for other communities to promote their community announcements but there was virtually zero take up for this after the first time we did this.
Meetup is still Terrible: expensive, unreliable, and plagued with bad user experience. Still though there was a lot we could do better to make our Meetup a success and avoid terrible events with very low attendance and engagement.
We haven’t yet been able to execute a full move off of Meetup so it’s unclear whether moving off Meetup entirely would have been beneficial - although the continued growth of our community on the platform would suggest otherwise. Adding Luma as a platform didn’t hurt but did contribute to workload for our organisers with replicated effort for each additional platform. The rebrand drove new engagement although without directly surveying our volunteers or attendees it’s hard to conclusively link the spike in growth with the new brand.
My approach to measuring metrics of success made it hard to decouple the result of each specific action but overall the result has been positive. Rebranding and parallel promotion of events to Luma definitely helped revive our community but did not measurably reduce our reliance on Meetup. Collaboration was great for bringing some new energy into our community but the impact of our collaboration efforts was hard to measure.
Yes, Meetup is terrible, but by doing things differently our community got back to growing and hosting great AI talks for our community.
I’m working with the awesome team at PyData London in an effort to learn how to coordinate our growing team of volunteers at AI Signals. I’ve learned a lot from volunteering about building teams around trust with PyData and may write up some of this work in future.
At Signals we’re figuring out how to make the most of our regained momentum, considering setting up an LLC to allow us to transact, building new partnerships with sponsors, and scaling the number of events we’re able to deliver.
If you’re a community organiser I hope this article had some useful insights into our experiences trying to move away from Meetup. I’d love to hear from you about your experiences as an organiser, please join the community over at notanother.pizza and join the conversation.
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