We are very close to the end of 2015 and it’s time give a look back to the first 11 months of this year understanding what I’ve accomplished and trying to get some resolutions for the new year as well!
2015 for my professional life was a year of changes: I moved to a new job, I learnt new programming paradigms (reactive and functional programming), I met a lot of incredible and talented people and many many other things.
Probably the biggest changes (or old loves?) are the creation of London JavaScript community and my returning as speaker on technical talks after a couple of years of inactivity.
Last May I started a new adventure creating a new JavaScript community in London; I spent a month to understand how and why I could do that properly.
I had the possibility in the past to be staff member of the largest Actionscript Italian community and it was really a great experience.
I was young, with a lot of passion, not much experience and the community was the perfect place for growing properly, meeting new friends, learning from the different people, trying to solve technical puzzle everyday and having fun why not!
Starting again this experience in a new country it was a real challenge for me, but this time, with way more experience than the first time, clear ideas and a touch of madness.
In 2013 I had the opportunity to spend few months in Silicon Valley and I went to several meetup events and conferences from San Francisco to San Jose.
What I was really impressed of that environment was for sure the vibe I was able to breathe in any of these events.
People from all over the world that help each others, facilitating the connections between individuals, creating opportunities and sharing knowledge.
I was astonished about this way of doing community and when I moved from Italy to London I spent the first 18 months going to different events trying to retrieve the same experience and vibe.
When I started the London Javascript community my main goal was definitely recreating that vibe in this great city where the best developers all over the world are working in interesting projects with a lots of challenges to solve.
That’s why I decided to do that, filling a gap present in London communities where there were many and strong vertical framework communities (like React and Angular one), but not a strong and general JavaScript community.
After 8 months I’ve to admit I’m very happy about the results that this community was able to generate:
- ~1400 members
- 7 live events
- 1 code lab for half day
- 2 webinars
- an average of 60 people per event
- Listed as O’Reilly Community partner, Google Community and Skillsmatter Community
- Community Partner of great events like: FullStack conference and Dot.JS conference
- more than 1900 tweets & retweets with more than 500 followers
I had also the opportunity to meet great speakers, amazing developers and passionate people.
What this community is giving me back is really invaluable and really hard to find in similar activities too, I’m really grateful of any single moment spent organising any event.
What about the resolutions for 2016?
Recently I started to gather the interest from several companies that are asking me to organise meetup events in their offices and that means all the hard work done is paying this community back!
I contacted few speakers from California and next year I’m organising a couple of webinars with speakers from Silicon Valley and directly from Google office in Mountain View.
I’m already in contact with few great speakers ready to share with the community tips and tricks on different topics like webpack, jspm, angular, webrtc, react and ES6! Keep an eye on the community page in order to discover more about these events.
Last but not least, I’m working right now on the official community website that will be a SPA website with socials integration and the possibility to subscribe to a technical newsletter where I’m going to share the best articles, tutorials and events on the web.
Obviously these are already in the roadmap but I’m really open to listen what the JavaScript community is looking for! So don’t waste this opportunity and share your ideas on how to grow and make more special OUR community!
lucamezzalira.com 