andygrunwald

I have been organizing a local tech meetup in Düsseldorf, Germany, for the last 11 years. We ran it _every month_ (except for the pandemic). This year (2024), I stopped doing it.

I share a lot of comments here. Especially the effort, which is not seen/appreciated. What I don't share is the trouble finding sponsors. Local (tech) companies are often happy to sponsor a room, food, and drinks for the evening. In exchange, they get a slide in the intro speech and the opportunity to present themselves. Recruiters are not welcome. This worked pretty well. If you want this, this is a different question.

However, I summed up my learnings from organizing over 90 meetups in two blog posts:

* Lessons learned from running a local tech meetup for 11 years (Sunday 14 January 2024) - https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-running-a...

* Lessons learned from running a local meetup (Tuesday 25 October 2016) - https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lesson-learned-from-running-a-...

Seeing https://github.com/openpodcast/apple-connector and https://github.com/openpodcast/spotify-connector this looks like API scraping.

Author of https://github.com/andygrunwald/go-jira here:

This lib is maintained, still a bit out of date and has a few flaws. Like using the same client for JIRA Cloud and JIRA OnPremise (different APIs). But most of the flaws have been evolved over time, while Atlassian switched strategies.

I am preparing a roadmap for v2 where I implement a lot of reliability features, like context support, but also separate APIs for OnPremise and Cloud and easier access for custom fields.

Watch the github repo if you want to stay up to date.

Author of https://github.com/andygrunwald/go-jira here: This lib is maintained, still a bit out of date and has a few flaws. Like using the same client for JIRA Cloud and JIRA OnPremise (different APIs). But most of the flaws have been evolved over time, while Atlassian switched strategies.

I am preparing a roadmap for v2 where I implement a lot of reliability features, like context support, but also separate APIs for OnPremise and Cloud and easier access for custom fields.

Watch the github repo if you want to stay up to date.

Author here. I am curious, what kind of tricks do you apply that are similar to connection naming?

Other options I know about:

1. Using an own username per application

2. Adding comments into every database query

Let me know what you think about all this.

Thanks!

I am a huge fan of Go. My question here would be more like: Is this comparable? A lot of people outside of google contribute to Go. Are similar standards applied to the Go Review Process like to internally created software?

A Question that came up while reading: What happens when I start with collecting all the ideas and too many ideas are coming up? Do I need to put a particular focus on managing these ideas? How to treat the team fairly when everyone comes with an idea?

A friend of mine posted https://kommunity.com/

I am an organizer of a Web Engineering Meetup in Düsseldorf, Germany, for > 6 years (https://www.meetup.com/Web-Engineering-Duesseldorf/). We run the event every month, with 50 up to 90 people. Indeed, our no-show rate is something between 40% and 50%. This is heavy, but we know it and calculate it in.

We run the complete meetup non-profit. Never put a euro in. Never got a euro out — everything based on sponsors. Our motivation is to learn, share knowledge, and have fun together. And we want to make it accessible for everyone to learn about web engineering.

Switching to the new cost model will reduce the no-show rate, but makes it 1000% times less accessible. In my opinion, Meetup.com is creating a higher barrier to enter a community. If we, the organizers, would pay for the attendees, we would pay 100$ up to 180$ every month. We have no interest to afford this.

Furthermore, what I don't get: Meetup is charging a lot of money for thousands of groups. The web platform is stale for>2 years. The last major feature was a facelift in design. But no feature that helps the organizers or users. The iOS app had some releases, but the app is far from a great UX. Flaky everywhere. I ask myself: What is this company doing? Where does all the money go?

Friends who run similar groups are thinking already to move away. Many people from the US think the same.

I think this tweet sums it up: https://twitter.com/obfuscurity/status/1183831607821656068

This guy wrote about his open source project which he made closed source: https://medium.com/@kitze/github-stars-wont-pay-your-rent-8b...

What so you mean by automated presubmits? Are those „just“ CI checks for static analysis or is there more sophisticated things going on like merging it to a generated branch, deploying it, running all tests in the infrastructure there and more?

Can you elaborate a little bit more on this? Or point me to a resource that is doing this?

When we take the language into consideration, unwound like to mention Redis.

Often codebases written in C are a a mess to understand, a mess to read. The Redis Source Code is understandable even without deep knowledge of C

Location: Düsseldorf, NRW, Germany

Remote: Maybe, but I would prefer onsite

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: The current web stack incl. container and resource scheduler. A few technologies I have worked with are Go, PHP, Redis, Memcached, MySQL, Docker, Mesos, Kubernetes, Saltstack, Chef, Apache, Nginx, Kafka, AWS/GCP

Résumé/CV: Please email me about my detailed CV. I have a bachelors degree in business economics + computer science and I am 9 years on the job. I started as a PHP programmer doing agency work with TYPO3. In the last 5 1/2 years, I am doing Site Reliability Engineering. I've helped to expand from one datacenter to five now (from the software perspective). I built a team around this. This team is lead by me since 4 years now. Since 2 years we introduced AWS and GCP into the stack for various areas. More details during a conversation.

Email: [email protected]

What I am looking for: An exciting job. I am an engineering manager and software engineer with a high focus on backend and infrastructure. Let us talk!