Re-building SoCal Julia

ChrisRackauckas commented 8 years ago

It seems this is dead.

Is there a reason why this has an IRC but not a Gitter?
What new things are going on in Julia in SoCal?
Who is moderating this?
Should the website get an overhaul? It doesn't look nice at all.

kshyatt commented 8 years ago

Hi @ChrisRackauckas

@garrison has moved on to the brighter pastures of Maryland. I am still in SoCal and pretty active and I'd absolutely love to see more community building, but I'm kind of super busy so I haven't done any of the actual work.

The reason why IRC and no Gitter is that when this was active, IRC was far more active than Gitter.

Updating the website (use Jekyll/GH pages if we aren't already?) would be great but I have absolutely no eye for design so I'd have to fob that one off.

New things - I have a dream of hosting a Julia Hackathon either at UCSB or in LA, or both! What are your thoughts?

ChrisRackauckas commented 8 years ago

LA would be nice for the Hackathon. I am centered in Irvine, and have been doing a lot with Julia here. We've had workshops (another one coming in the Fall sponsored by the UCI Data Science Initiative), Julia's becoming a part of some courses, etc. I have done blog posts about using Julia on the XSEDE Comet cluster which is based in San Diego. I know they've seen it and have re-tweeted it, but it may be interested to see if XSEDE and Comet would like to do something on getting started with Julia.

If possible, I would be interested in putting some effort to get this going.

garrison commented 8 years ago

That would be great, I would be happy to pass on the leadership of the meetup group.

garrison commented 8 years ago

Is there a reason why this has an IRC but not a Gitter?

I prefer methods of chat that are freely implementable and not owned by a single company. But since I will no longer be involved in this, it is completely up to you guys to decide.

ChrisRackauckas commented 8 years ago

@darwindarak picked up the meetup org. I wasn't able to take the organizer position without paying $15/month, so @darwindarak if you had to foot the bill, I'll buy you lunch at one of the meetups!

He's based in UCLA, so maybe he may know of a good central location for some kind of meeting? If not, I've talked to the UCI Data Science Initiative's director and they said we could likely use some of the facilities here.

Talking with @kshyatt, it seems like we may be able to pull together a workshop on parallel / cluster computing with Julia which is associated with XSEDE. Any follow up on that?

For reference I like Gitter because if two people are not on at the same time there's a log. Everytime I go to an IRC channel with low activity, I tend to never get a response. We can stay on IRC, but being active there is more difficult.

darwindarak commented 8 years ago

I would really like a workshop on cluster computing as well, but I think it might be a little too advanced for a first general meeting after such a long haitus, and not many people have access to a cluster. Perhaps we can start with something more accessible. I was thinking along the lines @kshyatt's "Your First Julia Pull Request" and having beginners write tests as a way to learn Julia syntax and features under the guidance of more experienced Julians (also doesn't hurt to get more tests written). Another good way to kick off the meeting would be for someone to present what's new in v0.5. I really do think that a parallel computing/cluster workshop would be cool though, and it should definitly be something we explore once we have a better gauge of the attending members.

I'm pretty sure I can get access to some rooms at UCLA as well, so it really comes down to who will be attending and where they are coming from. Maybe we could even rotate locations between meetings.

Let's setup the polls on meetup.com, since there may be people interested in Julia who might not be used to GitHub.

If this all sounds good, then I'll send emails and polls out to the group and setup a Gitter channel tonight.

ChrisRackauckas commented 8 years ago

Yeah, get things going. We can start with something basic. I'll trust your judgement because I haven't done these things before: I would've assumed the "Julia hardcore" would be showing more than Julia newcomers, but you would have more experience.

I think something like "Your First Julia Project" may be more accessible than "Your First Julia Pull Request". I think a lot more people would be interested in using Julia than contributing to Julia, especially if we're reaching out beyond Github users.

BTW, could I get SoCal-Julia access to get something going for the website?

garrison commented 8 years ago

Great to see some activity. Thanks for taking over!

Regarding the location survey, I am not surprised that most people are from Los Angeles. In the initial julia-users thread I was hoping to start a group with people all over SoCal, but the way Meetup suggests groups is based heavily on geographic proximity. So most people in the group ended up being in LA, even though I was attempting to organize things from Santa Barbara. In part I was trying to model things on the geographic spread of the SoCal Python group, but I think even they don't do anything much north of LA.

Speaking of julia-users, you may wish to announce the reboot there once you've scheduled a next meetup.