I’ve often been envious of hack nights that happen in SF, NY and many other two letter american states. I’m also especially jealous of all of the great events that happen in London town, stuff like the Web Performance Group and the London Ruby Group.
So, I created HydraHack, a meetup for developers in Birmingham who want to hack on projects with other developers or just grab some time for working on their own code. It should be less about sitting for 40 minutes though a presentation and more about meeting other people and sharing ideas and code.
Begin
Picking a date was the first step, even before I had a name or any idea who should turn up. Pick a name, book a location, now I had a deadline. I fired a few emails off to some local devs for a sanity check “Yep, good idea.”
Justine helped me figure out the name. HydraHack
Promote
To get some interest, I threw up a static page running on Heroku with the details and got the domain. I added a Twitter button which broadcast the meetup to anyone that RSVPed. Although I had to push a new version of the site anytime anyone actually pressed it, was actually quicker than writing any real code.
I had a few local developers in my Twitter list so they all got an invite, there’s also a couple of local PHP and Ruby meetups, they were a great place to get some initial interest. To find people outside my regular network I used really ugly services like Twellow to find some other web folk, there’s quite a high noise rate but I stumbled across a few people I’d never met before.
I also put the event up on Laynrd which is becoming the best place to RSVP/ Track events. Not only is tied in to everyone’s social graph, it helped me find a bunch of similar events and more local developers to share the event with.
Profit!
Kindly Campaign Monitor agreed to sponsor the drinks for the first meetup. With the lure of free coffee we managed we got 16 developers crammed into Urban Coffee Company hacking away on various projects. I’d just like to say thanks again to everyone that turned up, I couldn’t of asked for a better start.
Next
I’m busy organising the second meetup, tracking down developers, getting a sponsor and finding shiny free tech for people to play with. I have no idea how it will evolve, but I like making things fast and watching what happens.