After July 2014 we did not have any regular morning meetups anymore. The summer holidays came, then the one-day JavaScript workshop. We did have a “Show and Tell” meetup in October though, and then repeated that one December evening, both times with quite low numbers. (Kudos to Adam Butler who gave both his own and Andrew Nesbitt's talk at the December meetup).

As we had the evening workshops and hack nights we were wondering whether to drop the morning meetups at the Big Chill. The numbers had been relatively low, and it was sometimes difficult to find people to give small workshops.

Then Gicela and I had an idea. Why not use the morning meetups to learn JavaScript together, something we had started once, before we became a Meetup group.

We scheduled the first session for February 17. We had 16 people attending on that day, which was way more than we had ever had for a morning Meetup. It was a very friendly, communicative and diverse group of people. After a round of introductions I talked people through using the browser console, and then running some scripts in there involving JavaScript’s simple data types. I think this worked well to make sure everybody could start at least from that base level. It was great seeing that some discussions started around some of the concepts.

We’ve had a second session in the meantime, which was about functions, objects and arrays. We discussed some of the differences of defining functions in various ways, and different options of creating objects. We also heard a presentation on a personal project and an introduction to git and GitHub. We also started on a little single-page app which everybody could contribute to by adding a JSON file.

All in all this meetup seems to be off to a good start. Also, Eloquent JavaScript is a brilliant book, not only about JavaScript, but about programming in general. If all we achieve is working through that by keeping each other motivated, that would already be a lot. But it would be a nice bonus if we actually managed to build something together. That is challenging, as I know from last year, but I want to at least give it a try.

By Katja
Posted in Categories: javascript study_group