Hi out there. How have you all been? I’ve been busy (which is true, and even if it wasn’t is better than me saying I was sitting on my ass all this time doing nothing). I thought I would give a quick update to the series.
Since my last post (wow, that was awhile ago… sorry for anybody that’s been waiting around for this), I have managed to accomplish a few things related to my meetup. Let’s see, at the end of March I went up to the MMTMD (Mid-Michigan Testers Meet Down) near Lansing Michigan. I aspire to have a group as cool as this some day. For being the FIRST event ever for this new organization, Hilary had close to 40 people show. It was a 3+ hour-long event with multiple lightning talks, a main speaker (hi Matt), lunch and a testing game/exercise. I honestly thought this group had existed for some time, based on how smoothly things appeared to go.
I ended up giving a 6 minute ‘lightening talk’ on why I wanted to start my own meetup in Cleveland. Since I still had a bit of laryngitis, I did my talk via technology. I had typed up my talk in EverNote, sent it to Pocket, and then used the default text to speech British voice to read it via my phone + speakers. It was interesting. I made a few people chuckle, in what seemed like appropriate places. Phil seemed to think it was hilarious, but I couldn’t tell if it was my talk, or the over-the-top computer British accent.
I’m not going to do a huge write-up of the event as others already have (and did so far better than me) here (hey look, it’s my yellow shirt!) and here. If you are anywhere close to Lansing, MI, I highly recommend you attend the next event. Don’t see a next event on the calendar yet? Let Hilary know.
Previously, I had been trying to follow some advice given to me by Jeff “Cheezy” Morgan. He suggested I try to build an online community, to get people talking and connecting and THEN try to take it to a meetup format. Well, I’m either too impatient (maybe) or not that good at building a burgeoning online forum for testing discussions in the NE Ohio region (uh… yeah) so shortly before MMTMD, I decided to just start. I booked my first meeting for NOTiCE on April 17th. There will be coffee (sponsored with no strings!), and some talking… about… testing … Crap, I need a topic for this thing.
As I write this I have 15 members in the group (I stopped counting myself once I got over ten), and six attendees lined up for the first meeting (counting me), even without a topic set! I am really excited for this group to get going. At this point, all I need to do is pick a topic to discuss, and continue tweeting about this thing.
I am also hoping in the very near future that I will be announcing something awesome for me second meetup (I know, I know, I haven’t even managed to get one done and I am already on to the second). All I can say now is, if it works out, it will be super awesome. Really. It’s that exciting.
So, my next post will be a recap of my first event, and anything I can think of.
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