How to Start a Ruby Meetup | RubyEvents Guides

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How to Start a Ruby Meetup

A practical guide for starting and sustaining a local Ruby meetup — from finding your first venue to keeping it going years later.

Why Bother

Ruby is more than a programming language - it’s a community. Meetups are what keep that community alive. An active meetup scene produces the people who later travel to conferences, give talks, and build open source.

A local meetup is where a junior developer gets inspired. It’s where someone lands a job because they had the right conversation. It’s where someone stuck on a bad project hears a talk that finally cracks the thing they’ve been fighting for weeks.

None of that happens online. You do not need a big reason to start a meetup - you just need to want one to exist.

“I learned Ruby in my local meetup in my city. When I was going to that local meetup, I had contact with Ruby. So that's why I'm so deeply connected with community — because I learned that way.”

Cirdes Henrique

Tropical on Rails

Starting From Zero

The first meetup is the hardest. You have no experience and no idea if anyone will show up.

It’s fine, we’ve all been there. Do the minimum that gets some Rubyists into a room, and worry about everything else later.

Your first venue

Secure a venue for a specific date. Without a place to meet, there can be no meetup.

The best first venue for a tech meetup is often an office. Many companies have meeting rooms and common spaces sitting empty in the evenings. A Ruby shop is the obvious first call, but any tech company with a suitable space works. They get their name mentioned to a room full of developers and you get a free room.

Universities, co-working spaces - or even bars or bakeries - are other options. All you need is enough chairs, somewhere to plug in a laptop, and ideally a wall or screen to project on.

“When I started these meetups, my first call was to one of my former employers. They are a Ruby shop, and I knew they had a pretty nice meeting room.”

Hans Schnedlitz

Vienna.rb

Create an event

Once you have a venue, pick a date and put up an event listing. It needs only the basics - the date, time, location, and a sentence or two about what the meetup is. You can add speakers and program details as they are confirmed.

Tools

When choosing an event hosting platform, there’s really only two options.

Luma is lightweight and works well when you already know how you will promote the event. Meetup.com costs money, but can help people who search for local groups discover you.

Do not expect these platforms to promote the event for you. They will not.

Get the word out

For the first event, promotion is simple. Just tell everyone you know! Email and text the Rubyists in your contacts. Message colleagues and former colleagues who write Ruby. Post in whatever Slack, Discord, or social channel your local community already uses.

That is enough for starters. The systematic side of getting people through the door comes later, once the meetup is a recurring thing.

Five people is fine

The first event will probably be small. That’s fine - it’s a first event. Some of the best ongoing meetups started with a handful of people. What matters is that the people who came had a decent time and would come again.

Don’t measure the first event against a full room. You created something that didn’t exist before, and people showed up and connected because of you!

Your Format

Every meetup is different - there is no format to rule them all. Find something that works for the specific group of people who show up in your specific region.

That said, some formats are more common than others.

Talks

The most common meetup format is two or three talks, followed by — or interspersed with — time for people to hang out and talk to each other. It works because talks give people something to react to. They create shared context that makes starting conversations easier. “What did you think of that talk?” is a much lower-stakes opening than “So, what do you work on?”

For talk length, shorter is almost always better. A talk that runs long eats into the time people came for: seeing each other and talking.

Talks may be the reason people come to the meetup, but the conversations are the reason they come back.

Alternatives

A hack night where people bring projects to work on and help each other. This works well for communities where developers already know each other well enough to be comfortable working alongside strangers. It is harder to run cold, because newcomers don’t know what to work on or who to ask for help, but it can be a great change of pace for a group that’s been running a while and wants variety.

A workshop where one person leads a hands-on exercise. This requires more preparation assumes attendees have laptops and - most importantly - a willingness to code with others. It’s great when it lands, but harder to run than the alternatives.

A...