max-mapper
commented
11 years ago Thanks magwitch. Here's a quick writeup of the event:
NodeSchool London
Last night in London at the Shoreditch Works Village Hall we held the first ever public NodeSchool event in Europe. Previous NodeSchool events have been held at JS and Node conferences as part of the events for conference attendees, but this event was different in that we let anyone register for free.
We ended up selling out, with 100 attendees RSVP'd and 10 mentors. In reality around 75 people showed up (for free events you can expect a decent percentage of people to not attend). The Village Hall had a big, modern space with tons of chairs and about 6 big tables, which we filled up. There was also seating along the back wall provided you could compute with your laptop on your lap, plenty of power everywhere and above average WiFi.
When attendees arrived they were instructed to pick a spot, look at the projector screen to get the wifi code and visit a local IP address which opened up a page with instructions that was running from my laptop:
I had pre-packaged zips of all of the workshops (including dependencies) since NPM is slow in Europe and it was having some issues that day. Also if you have 75 people do npm install with modules such as the NodeSchool workshops that need dozens of dependencies it would probably kill the internet anyway. The NodeSchool workshop authors highly value offline-first principles in the design of the workshops themselves, and it really helps when doing events such as this where we can't rely on the internet.
As part of promoting the event I reached out to some local Noders that I knew, and asked them to invite their friends to be mentors. We had 9 mentors at the event, which was a pretty good ratio. Mentors float around the event asking attendees if they are stuck, or if the attendees are too scared to ask for help then the mentors would try to peak over their shoulders and give them unsolicited advice.
I am very proud to say that every single one of our attendees was able to get a workshop installed and progress through at least the first two challenges. We had a few attendees that had never coded before, and with the help of their neighbors and mentors were able to start learning the basics of JS.
After about an hour of hacking on the workshops I encouraged people to get up, stretch their legs and meet some of the other attendees over a cup of lemonade. Some did, others kept on truckin' through the workshops.
To cover the overhead of using such a fine space in the heart of Shoreditch we had a couple of sponsors throw in a couple hundred euros each.
Many thanks to hood.ie, StreetHub and Kano for making the event possible, and to @monkchips and the rest of the team at Shoreditch Works for giving us a good deal on using the Village Hall venue.
mikeal
brianloveswords
olizilla
eatenbyagrue
A big thank you to Max Ogden and the others who organised the London meet-up last night. It was a superb event and I hope the other attendees enjoyed it as much as I did. The mentors were excellent in their help, advice and support - thank you all. And, of course, thank you to the sponsors for making it all possible. I'm looking forward to the next one.