Meetups are Boring. Let’s Change That.

I have found that a typical Philly tech meetup is boring. You grab beer, pizza, and awkwardly try to socialize with drunk people. Then you sit down for a 40 minute PowerPoint slideshow, in which half the audience falls asleep or not pay attention.

What I can change that?

That’s where TacoJS comes in.

I had a few simple ideas in mind for a new meetups:

1. Give people more of a reason to come that’s not “free food.”
2. Instead of pizzas, let’s have tacos.
3. Make the talks shorter, short enough that it’s hard to zone out.
4. Let’s save the drinks for until after the talks.

I did not know it at the time, but it turns out that similar meetups already exists. A web search for similar meetups out on the west coast - WaffleJS and DonutJS, which in turn were heavily inspired by BrooklynJS. I decided to pay BrooklynJS a visit and it turns out that everyone actually enjoyed the meetup – which rarely happens in Philly! Shameless plug: BrooklynJS and QueensJS are super-duper hype and you should attend them at least once in your lifetime.

I took that format down to Philly, got a few speakers, and BAM! We held our first meetup in July 2016, and the rest was history.

Design

I built a website for TacoJS using Jekyll. It’s open source on GitHub and you should totally check it out. I also worked on some sweet logos, a PowerPoint theme, and nametags for the meetups:

Come speak at TacoJS!!!1!

Unfortunately, we had not had a recent meetup lately due to the lack of speakers (this is an issue most Javascript-related meetups in Philly are facing), but I hope to change that soon. You can follow @TacoJS on Twitter for updates.