Want to run an event?

[mikeal]

Can we use this thread to collect "what you need to know to run a NodeSchool" so that we can link to this on the main website and encourage more people to run local events.

Listening to this podcast is probably a good idea :)

http://www.nodeup.com/fiftyfive

Also read these summary posts from previous events:

http://blog.hood.ie/2013/11/nodeschool-london/ https://github.com/nodeschool/nodeschool.github.io/issues/15

[richorama]

Report from our Norwich nodeschool event, from a small corner of England.

We had 30 attendees, but only 2 mentors (we're not in Oakland you know - node.js experience is scarce!). This ratio worked, but for the mentors it was a non-stop 4 hours!

We ran the event from 12:30 to 4:30 pm, which included a 10 minute introduction at the start, and at 15 minute wrap up at the end.

We moved tables and chairs around to create small groups, and to encourage collaboration and discussion. This seemed to work, and people worked together in some cases.

Four or five people completed 'learnyounode'. Others were keen to finish the lessons at home.

I noticed that people with no (or little) JavaScript experience struggled with some of the lessons, particularly when async was introduced. I found myself explaining the concept of a callback several times. The idea of passing a function around was a lot for people to get their heads around, especially when the example shows an anonymous function declared in the argument. It made more sense to people when you create a function called callback, and pass a reference to that in.

I think a 'learnyoujavascript' would have been valuable for these people. Perhaps I should have pointed them to a JavaScript tutorial or book prior to the workshop.

The feedback was very positive on the quality of the tutorial package, people were impressed with how sophisticated the testing was on verify

We had a couple of technical issues with laptops, and I ended up lending my laptop to someone as we couldn't get learnyounode to work (I'll report the issue separately). I suggest organisers have a couple of spare machines just in case.

We had to ask for more power sockets. I would suggest organisers bring a few spare 4 way adaptors.

Everyone enjoyed the afternoon, everyone learnt something, and I think everyone said they'd like to attend a future nodeschool event!

[hackygolucky]

I think there's been a number of people that would have -loved- to have a learnyoujavascript. Maybe we should consider building a new workshop :D

Great feedback! And here, here! Two mentors with 30 students is an insane and awesome effort @richorama

On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 3:50 AM, Richard Astbury notifications@github.comwrote:

Report from our Norwich nodeschool event, from a small corner of England.

We had 30 attendees, but only 2 mentors (we're not in Oakland you know - node.js experience is scarce!). This ratio worked, but for the mentors it was a non-stop 4 hours!

We ran the event from 12:30 to 4:30 pm, which included a 10 minute introduction at the start, and at 15 minute wrap up at the end.

We moved tables and chairs around to create small groups, and to encourage collaboration and discussion. This seemed to work, and people worked together in some cases.

Four or five people completed 'learnyounode'. Others were keen to finish the lessons at home.

I noticed that people with no (or little) JavaScript experience struggled with some of the lessons, particularly when async was introduced. I found myself explaining the concept of a callback several times. The idea of passing a function around was a lot for people to get their heads around, especially when the example shows an anonymous function declared in the argument. It made more sense to people when you create a function called callback, and pass a reference to that in.

I think a 'learnyoujavascript' would have been valuable for these people. Perhaps I should have pointed them to a JavaScript tutorial or book prior to the workshop.

The feedback was very positive on the quality of the tutorial package, people were impressed with how sophisticated the testing was on verify

We had a couple of technical issues with laptops, and I ended up lending my laptop to someone as we couldn't get learnyounode to work (I'll report the issue separately). I suggest organisers have a couple of spare machines just in case.

We had to ask for more power sockets. I would suggest organisers bring a few spare 4 way adaptors.

Everyone enjoyed the afternoon, everyone learnt something, and I think everyone said they'd like to attend a future nodeschool event!

[image: highres_341026882]https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/353138/2395665/a18a3d2c-a9cc-11e3-8823-a49a1724567f.jpeg

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/nodeschool/discussions/issues/93#issuecomment-37395477 .

[max-mapper]

NodeSchool JSFest 2014 at Joyent In San Francisco

For JSFest @mikeal scheduled 3 separate nodeschool events over 2 days. Each was around 4 hours long and happened in a conference room at Joyent Inc in the SF financial district.

We didn't have a ton of space so we opened up 30 attendee spots and 15 mentor spots for each workshop.

Day 1 (2 back to back workshops): 15-20 attendees showed up, 5 mentors Day 2 (1 morning workshop): 10 attendees, 4 mentors

Both days were really, really awesome. These were the smallest and longest workshops that I've hosted, and everyone got to know each other and establish a pretty good atmosphere/rapport.

We had a great group of attendees that ranged in experience. Because of the small size I had people do a round of "icebreaker" intros where they said their name, where they were from and what their programming history and aspirations were. It worked well and gave others a nice reference point to make small talk about later in the workshops.

We had some college students that were totally new to JS all the way up to one woman who is the author of a JavaScript book (and wanted to get into Node)!

The first day we did Learn You Node in the morning and Stream Adventure in the afternoon. @substack came by for Stream Adventure and helped facilitate. The majority of attendees stayed all day and continued working on Learn You Node during the second half of the day. Mentors were kept busy with lots of good discussions. Some attendees needed more explanations of JS concepts than others. I'd like to throw another +1 on the pile re: needing a intro JS workshopper.

Day 2 had less people (understandable - the weather was amazing outside and Fluent Conf also started that day). In spite of the small size it was actually better than day 1 IMO because we copied the Sinfo nodeschool and tried out their pairing technique.

We split attendees up into random pairs and dove into Level Me Up. The atmosphere on day 2 was incredible! Lots more overhearing of conversations and a better ambient noise level. We had an even number of attendees so nobody had to go it alone. From what I can tell everyone had a great experience in their pairs. Nobody had LevelDB experience and going through it with a partner didn't seem to detract in any way.

Lessons Learned

• We should have paired from the start, and only done one day. Two days was a bit taxing on me in terms of time commitment.
• Small groups are just as awesome as large groups
• Ice breakers are worth it. Lots of great friendships were formed

[eugeneware]

:+1: on the intro to JS workshopper. Even amongst those who had some JS experience I was surprised at how many people had never heard or had used .forEach() or .map().

Dealing with the weird JS function scoping around for loops was quite tricky to explain too.

A JS for cats workshopper tool would be really cool.

And yes, the pairing thing was very successful. It definitely reduced the need for so many mentors as they were more effectively solving problems on their own, which was awesome to watch.

It was also great to see many people attend all 3 of the workshops too. People really want to learn this stuff!

[olizilla]

Go Norwich! Go JSFest!

@maxogden... first nodeconf, now this... I think @mikeal is trying to test your workshopper endurance limits. Next up: a 4 day nodeschool marathon, teaching bytewiser to a crowd of assembled deer and bobcats, as a walker creek warm up gig.

[jasonrhodes]

This thread is amazing. Thanks to everyone for sharing their experiences here. I'm getting started planning our first nodeschool event in Baltimore and the information here has been a huge help so far.

If any of you have specific thoughts or want to follow our issue#1 planning discussion and offer advice, please feel free: baltimorenodeschool/baltimorenodeschool.github.io#1

Alternately, I think it would be great if any of you who have run events so far have gathered any quotes from attendees about how easy it was, how much they learned, etc. and posted them back here. I am focusing on getting a high turnout of people new to programming or new to Javascript and I think having testimonials from previous events would be a huge help, and probably to others starting events as well.

Thanks again, everyone!

[richorama]

@jasonrhodes there may be some comments from attendees you could harvest from here: http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/158375062/

[marxian]

After mentoring in Norwich I'd certainly echo the need for a nodeschool javascript workshopper. I spent at least as much time helping developers with language concepts as with node concepts. For the Java, .NET and C# folk I encountered it felt like what was needed was the "Functional Javascript" workshop but starting a couple of steps closer to the ground.

One or two were drawn to the event by excitement about node and went away additionally delighted by liberation from C-style loops...

I'd probably also have adjusted our table layout a little too. Anything that can maximise the number of immediate neighbours an attendee has will increase the quantity (and quality) of learning. In retrospect I think pairing is the way to go.

[sclarson]

We had a typical classroom layout with everyone facing the same direction and pairing with neighbors when they wanted. Next time we're going to rearrange the tables so that pairs of tables face one another. We're probably also going to encourage pairing a lot more. Especially those new to JavaScript.

On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 4:09 PM, Rupert Redington notifications@github.comwrote:

After mentoring in Norwich I'd certainly echo the need for a nodeschool javascript workshopper. I spent at least as much time helping developers with language concepts as with node concepts. For the Java, .NET and C# folk I encountered it felt like what was needed was the "Functional Javascript" workshop but starting a couple of steps closer to the ground.

One or two were drawn to the event by excitement about node and went away additionally delighted by liberation from C-style loops...

I'd probably also have adjusted our table layout a little too. Anything that can maximise the number of immediate neighbours an attendee has will increase the quantity (and quality) of learning.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/nodeschool/discussions/issues/93#issuecomment-37587141 .

[max-mapper]

Found this event through twitter, it wasn't on the nodeschool.io site but happened a couple days ago in Wisconsin! http://www.meetup.com/milwaukeejs/events/168041402/

[jarrettch]

Any experiences of people having trouble getting mentors, and what they'd do differently? I'm thinking of planning an event in LA but given my lack of javascript experience relative to some who have facilitated nodeschool events elsewhere I'm wondering if I should find mentors before trying to secure a venue and whatnot.

Are most mentors friends/acquaintances or do they randomly sign up after an event is announced? Obviously spreading the word is key but I'd hate to spread the word and end up the only "mentor."

[hackygolucky]

@jarrettch we've leaned heavily on our local nodejs user group organizers for mentoring and they've been fantastic. If there isn't one in LA, I would suggest seeking help from JSLA. Met a couple of folk at nodeconf last year from that group and they were amazing.

[jarrettch]

@hackygolucky thanks for the tips! Unfortunately it appears the So Cal node.js Meetup is inactive, but JS.LA is definitely active. Maybe I can convince them to put one together.

[mikeal]

@jarrettch you should reach out to @emkay, he's down in the LA scene. Also, if you're light on mentors you should definitely go with the pairing setup that @maxogden mentioned earlier, it encourages the attendees to help each other a lot more.

[emkay]

@jarrettch js.la is planning one now. :)

[jarrettch]

@emkay yeah, I reached out to Carlo last week and he told me about it. Thanks! Looking forward to it!

[julianduque]

NodeSchool Medellin v2 - Streams Adventure!

Event was awesome and people from the local community was really happy with this new edition of NodeSchool \o/.

Attendance was limited to 30 people due to space limitations but around 70 people registered to the event, next time we will see if we can do like two events in a day or weekend to educate all the people.

Only 1 mentor was available (me) but plan is to have more people mentoring, good thing was that attendees paired with others and together they figured it out the solutions.

And we gave some home made swag provided by a member of the local maker community.

Thanks to Atom House and MedellinJS community :)

[hackygolucky]

Oh man, awesome!

On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 5:49 PM, Julian Duque notifications@github.comwrote:

NodeSchool Medellin v2 - Streams Adventure!

Event was awesome and people from the local community was really happy with this new edition of NodeSchool \o/.

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/fc74d7aac728578c59db43170fc0b2e71032dd32/68747470733a2f2f7062732e7477696d672e636f6d2f6d656469612f426c43594d5074494541414d53314f2e6a7067

Attendance was limited to 30 people due to space limitations but around 70 people registered to the event, next time we will see if we can do like two events in a day or weekend to educate all the people.

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/8247fa10bf2e02349eb78bd6702c6eba23f7a41f/68747470733a2f2f7062732e7477696d672e636f6d2f6d656469612f426c434c6d4e4449414141324a35792e6a70673a6c61726765

Only 1 mentor was available (me) but plan is to have more people mentoring, good thing was that attendees paired with others and together they figured it out the solutions.

And we gave some home made swag provided by a member of the local maker community.

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/780f1c1ea9861b31fae6c65e2b058b428486685b/68747470733a2f2f7062732e7477696d672e636f6d2f6d656469612f426c436b466e70495941414e434d722e6a7067

Thanks to Atom House http://en.atomhouse.co/ and MedellinJShttp://www.meetup.com/MedellinJS/events/175162032/community :)

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/nodeschool/discussions/issues/93#issuecomment-40325669 .

[max-mapper]

nodeschool Tour of Norway just wrapped up last night! check out the awesome page that the web rebels made for it (with photos of each event): https://www.webrebels.org/tour

[iancrowther]

@maxogden - tour of Norway looked like great fun.. to be fair webrebels looks solid too!

[hayeah]

NodeSchool Chengdu had 40 people showing up, and 6 coaches. Despite our inexperience in hosting events, the attendants learned some NodeJS, and asked for follow up events. We used Learn You Node.

Chengdu is a metrapolis in central China, pop. 14 million, known for pandas, silk, and its fiery cuisine. Nowadays it has a vibrant and growing gaming industry. Come visit!

I am writing this wrap-up so next time I can avoid the same noob mistakes. Perhaps other organizers in China can use my plan as a starting point.

Attendents

By professions (vagrant is a joke category... ):

By tech background:

The Venue

We borrowed Hoolai Games' office space in software park.

• Plenty of chairs and table space
• Lots of power plugs
• Air conditioned and well-lit
• Whiteboard & projector available
• Wifi

Preparation

We asked attendents to install NodeJS and NodeSchool before the event. We also told them that if they don't know how, don't worry about it. Just come and we'll help them setup.

As other NodeSchool evenets had warned, we expected wifi to be flaky at best. So I made the followings available on a USB drive:

• VirtualBox installers for Windows and OSX.
• Virtual Machine with NodeSchool and Sublime editor (ubuntu 12.04).
  • Built with VirtualBox.
  • Exported to ".ova" format, which is compatible with VirtualBox and VMWare.
  • The exported VM image is about 1G.
  • The running image requires 512MB of RAM.
• Screencast explaining how to use the Virtual Machine.

Also, following Max Ogden's idea, I made a static website running on local network with basic information about NodeSchool. The USB drive's content is available for download via the static site as well.

If you want the VM image, email me. I'll find a place to upload it. The screencast I made is in Chinese.

The Schedule

• 1:45pm - Arrival
• 2:00pm -> 2:10pm - Introduction to event and coaches.
• 2:10pm -> 2:40pm - Lightning Talks.
• 2:40pm -> 3:00pm - NodeSchool Demo
• 3:00pm -> 3:15pm - Attendents Pairing
• 3:15pm -> 5:00pm - NodeSchool
• 5:00pm -> 5:30pm - Wrap-up

Problems

Stupid mistakes were made...

• No Mac adapter for projector... so the talks and demo (except one) were canceled.
• Brought home-baked cookies, but forgot to hand them out.
• Event was initially announced with a different venue. Confusion and frantic notifications days before the event.
• Email delivery to Chinese mail services (QQ, NetEase, etc.) is flaky.

Things To Improve

• Don't change venue (duh).
• Should've asked for phone numbers, and send SMS for reminders.
• Use multiple channels to send reminders: email, sms, wechat group.
• Bring more USB drives in a file system format that both Mac and Windows can read.
• Although we encouraged pairing, most people didn't. Only people who came with real-life friends or co-worker paired.
• It would've been helpful to record screencasts that solves the first 2 challenges, to show people how to interact with the nodeschool program.
• Didn't close the event well. Haphazardly said, "ok guys, event's over. Feel free to stay or chat."
• Some people didn't interact with their table mates much.
• Would be nice to have schwags to hand out...
• Would be nice to showcase some cool nodejs projects, because while many people have heard of "high-concurrency" and "async", they don't know what to build with NodeJS.

Checklist

Here's a checklist I'd use next time for hosting NodeSchool:

Pre-Planning

• Go through this thread to learn from other NodeSchool organizers
• Add your event to the NodeSchool spreadsheet

Choose a venue

• Does the projector work?
• Enough power plugs?
• Wifi?
• Enough chairs and tables?
• How many people can it fit?
• Is the venue publicly accessible? (keycard?)
• Are there other things going on? (Cafe? People working?)

Announcement - (2 weeks in advance)

• Create event announcement
  • Date and time
  • Contact info of organizer
  • Venue
  • Fee (or say "free")
  • Event size limit
  • Level of experience required (or say "none")
  • Equipment required (laptop. Mac or Windows)
  • The announcement: gist
• Sign up form should ask for:
  • Name
  • email
  • Phone number
  • Level of NodeJS experience
  • Level of JavaScript experience
  • Why do you want to attend (interesting insight here)
• Ask local community to retweet event
• Find volunteers to help

Preparation

• NodeSchool VM
• Screencast to demo how to use VM
• Screencast to demo NodeSchool
• VM & videos on USB drives

Reminder - (2 days in advance)

• Ask attendents to install NodeSchool
• Direction/Map to event venue
• Reminder of event time
• Ask attendents to arrive 15 minutes early
• Invitation to join a chat group of some sort (WeChat in China)

Day of Event

• Arrive 30 minutes earlier
• Post wifi & password on the wall
• Post local IP of event web site
• Give out cards for people to write their names on
• Help early arrivers to install environment if necessary
• Demo NodeSchool live
  • show how to run an exercise
  • show how to debug
  • show how to open documentation locally
  • show how to use dependencies preinstalled by learnyounode
• Announce that screencasts are available on event site

Wrap up

• Take a group photo
• Encourage people to stay around and chat

Thanks

Thanks to all the attendents who came, and the coaches for their time and patience:

• Lite
• @luin
• @miaoever
• 吴东强
• @heroicyang
• @alsotang
• Hoolai Games

[jlord]

@hayeah That's a great write up, thank you!

[hackygolucky]

Holy smokes @hayeah that's a very helpful post!!!

On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 9:13 AM, Jessica Lord notifications@github.com wrote:

@hayeah https://github.com/hayeah That's a great write up, thank you!

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/nodeschool/discussions/issues/93#issuecomment-45635598 .

[mikeal]

@hayeah this is one of the best writeups I've seen yet!

We should take a lot of these points and work them in to a checklist that can help organizers.

[brianloveswords]

@hayeah woo, this is awesome!

NodeSchool Chengdu had 40 people showing up, and 6 coaches. Despite our inexperience in hosting events, the attendants learned some NodeJS, and asked for follow up events.

Congrats! If people are asking for follow-up events, you are doing something right.

Brought home-baked cookies, but forgot to hand them out.

Aww bummer – but that's rad that you made cookies :)

@mikeal – A general checklist definitely sounds like a good idea to me.

[eddieajau]

:+1: @hayeah - great write-up. I'd see if you can add that as a "How to run your own Node School event" page on https://github.com/nodeschool/nodeschool.github.io

[hayeah]

@brianloveswords thanks for the kind words : ) Hopefully next time we can do a better job.

@eddieajau @mikeal I guess I'll go ahead and create a checklist page for "How to run nodeschool event". Then you guys can add more stuff to it as appropriate.

[hybrisCole]

Hey :),

Just wanted to share some nice pics from our Costa Rican nodeschool event that happened today :)

http://www.meetup.com/costaricajs/photos/22683872/#377534292

The attendants were really excited and they are definitely going to finish all the exercises!

[rsoares]

Hey! So me and a couple of fellows are planning to run a nodeschool event in the south of Portugal, as part of our local tech meetup. I wanted to add the event to the nodeschool spreadsheet but it seems that's read only. Who can I reach to help me with this?

Thanks :)

[max-mapper]

@jlord is the owner of the spreadsheet

[jlord]

@rsoares I just changed it so that anyone with the link can now edit :pencil2: :tada:

[rsoares]

Yay! Thanks @jlord and @maxogden!

[ralucas]

Hi guys, Wanted to see if anyone had any suggestions on how to reach out to a wider audience? Like to see more people that may be interested in it, but don't know about the meetup page or nodeschool.io. Thanks.

Richard

[sclarson]

Local universities, and asking meet up members to tell coworkers has had great results for us.

I haven't tried it but you could also try cold contacting all the developers you can find in your area on Linked In. I'd be more happy to be told about user groups than I am to talk to more recruiters.

Members of our group have also contacted HR reps and dev managers at companies and asked them to inform their people about it with varying amounts of success.

On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 7:53 PM, Richard Lucas notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi guys, Wanted to see if anyone had any suggestions on how to reach out to a wider audience? Like to see more people that may be interested in it, but don't know about the meetup page or nodeschool.io. Thanks.

Richard

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/nodeschool/discussions/issues/93#issuecomment-49247020 .

[gsf]

LibertyJS NodeSchool

At LibertyJS last weekend here in Philadelphia we held a NodeSchool workshop in the morning. We had around 25 students and 3 mentors. We were lucky to have a beautiful space and no internet issues to speak of.

Recap

We started with a quick introduction of the mentors, then we checked general experience levels with Node around the room. There were 2 or 3 people who were familiar with Node at each cluster of tables already, so we left people sitting where they were. Then we dove into the "Hello World" exercise of learnyounode just to make sure everyone had the necessary pieces installed and understood how to progress through the workshopper menu.

The more experienced people mostly tackled the ExpressWorks and Stream and Browserify Adventure workshops while everyone else made their way through Learn You The Node.js For Much Win! The mentors circled, answering questions and encouraging people to talk to their neighbors. This really worked out well. For example, one student with a Windows machine wasn't too familiar with cmd, but a couple of other Windows users were able to get him all set up.

Conclusions

I don't have much in the "lessons learned" department because the event went really well thanks to the awesome workshops and the other writeups here. We had wise mentors, a nice mix of levels among the students, and a good atmosphere for learning and meeting people. While the official NodeSchool time was only a couple of hours in the morning, a number of people continued with their workshops in the afternoon during the open hack time. The essence of this tweet by @samuelcouch was echoed by many: "After playing with @nodejs a lot on Saturday at #libertyjs I'm excited to learn more about it. Pretty neat stuff!"

Thanks to @pselle and @jsacra for running Philadelphia JavaScript Developers and setting up LibertyJS, and thanks to my fellow NodeSchool mentors @nathanbowser and @cheyner.

[orliesaurus]

Just a heads up - we're running NodeSchool in London September the 10th more info on the london repo

[uptownhr]

I ran a workshop not too long ago and thinking about running one on google hangout. Has anyone tried a workshop on google hangout before? Would love to hear some feedbacks and see if it worked out well or if others just think its a bad idea. Please let me know.

thanks.

[max-mapper]

First Ever NodeSchool Taiwan

@substack, @jlord, @mafintosh and @watson and I are in Taipei this week for the JSDC conference. I met with @cfsghost at the Node.js Party last week (Node.js Party is the name of the Node.js meetup in Taipei) and we set up a Taiwan chapter for NodeSchool.

Then with only 24 hours notice (!!!) @clonn and the JSDC team got 60 attendees to come to the first dedicated NodeSchool Taiwan event. It was hosted in partnership with the Mozilla Taiwan Community Space in Taipei. They have a awesome event space next door to their regular community space that they rented out for the evening so we could hold all of the NodeSchoolers.

The event went from 7 - 10pm. We started with me doing a intro to nodeschool and learnyounode, which was live translated into Chinese. I also showed people http://generalhenry.com/ as a fallback in case they couldn't get learnyounode installed.

After a few minutes @substack mentioned that he had recently found the javascripting workshop by @sethvincent, so we decided to tell attendees about it. Sure enough a lot of attendees lacked a lot of JS experience and immediately switched from learnyounode to javascripting.

Two women who attended, who both work at http://womany.net/, a lifestyle blog for women in Taiwan, stayed late and finished the javascripting workshop and are now planning on starting a regular class to get more women in Taiwan into web development by hosting javascripting workshops as a sort of gentle introduction to nodeschool in general.

I also tried a new technique that worked pretty well: using stickers as bait to get people to register on the Taiwan NodeSchool Team. Basically we announced that if you want NodeSchool + GitHub stickers you can come up to the front and enter your GitHub username into my laptop. I had them enter it into the 'Invite or add users to this team' field of the Taiwan team page under the NodeSchool org on GitHub. This page is not publicly viewable for some reason (I emailed GitHub today to ask why this is) but it looks like this:

Now we have ~50 (43 plus 9 pending invitations) people on the Taiwan team, which means they can use the nodeschool/taiwan repo as a discussion board to talk about nodeschool stuff and plan future events in Chinese.

Also I spent yesterday hacking on localization for the nodeschool website, and @cfsghost translated it to Traditional Chinese today!

Also a lot of attendees had a hard time with learnyounode due to language barriers so some of the attendees started translating learnyounode to Traditional Chinese as well. There is this thread about translation support in learnyounode which suggests forking and translating today, and in the future @rvagg + the other maintainers will figure out a way to let the user easily switch languages.

The work in progress zh-tw version of learnyounode is at: https://github.com/cfsghost/learnyounode/tree/tanslation-zh-tw/exercises

[jasonrhodes]

Awesome work, everyone! Great story and lots of great results!

On Oct 14, 2014, at 4:31 AM, Max Ogden notifications@github.com wrote:

First Ever NodeSchool Taiwan

@substack, @jlord, @mafintosh and @watson and I are in Taipei this week for the JSDC conference. I met with @cfsghost at the Node.js Party last week (Node.js Party is the name of the Node.js meetup in Taipei) and we set up a Taiwan chapter for NodeSchool.

Then with only 24 hours notice (!!!) @clonn and the JSDC team got 60 attendees to come to the first dedicated NodeSchool Taiwan event. It was hosted in partnership with the Mozilla Taiwan Community Space in Taipei. They have a awesome event space next door to their regular community space that they rented out for the evening so we could hold all of the NodeSchoolers.

The event went from 7 - 10pm. We started with me doing a intro to nodeschool and learnyounode, which was live translated into Chinese. I also showed people http://generalhenry.com/ as a fallback in case they couldn't get learnyounode installed.

After a few minutes @substack mentioned that he had recently found the javascripting workshop by @sethvincent, so we decided to tell attendees about it. Sure enough a lot of attendees lacked a lot of JS experience and immediately switched from learnyounode to javascripting.

Two women who attended (they both work at http://womany.net/, a lifestyle blog for Women in Taiwan, stayed late and finished the javascripting workshop and are now planning on starting a regular class to get more women in Taiwan into web development by hosting javascripting workshops as a sort of gentle introduction to nodeschool in general.

I also tried a new technique that worked pretty well: using stickers as bait to get people to register on the Taiwan NodeSchool Team. Basically we announced that if you want NodeSchool + GitHub stickers you can come up to the front and enter your GitHub username into my laptop. I had them enter it into the 'Invite or add users to this team' field of the Taiwan team page under the NodeSchool org on GitHub. This page is not publicly viewable for some reason (I emailed GitHub today to ask why this is) but it looks like this:

Now we have ~50 (43 plus 9 pending invitations) people on the Taiwan team, which means they can use the nodeschool/taiwan repo as a discussion board to talk about nodeschool stuff and plan future events in Chinese.

Also I spent yesterday hacking on localization for the nodeschool website, and @cfsghost translated it to Traditional Chinese today!

Also a lot of attendees had a hard time with learnyounode due to language barriers so some of the attendees started translating learnyounode to Traditional Chinese as well. There is this thread about translation support in learnyounode which suggests forking and translating today, and in the future @rvagg + the other maintainers will figure out a way to let the user easily switch languages.

The work in progress zh-tw version of learnyounode is at: https://github.com/cfsghost/learnyounode/tree/tanslation-zh-tw/exercises

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[emkay]

Hey did anyone ever make NodeSchool stickers?

[finnp]

@emkay We printed some for NodeSchool Berlin (https://github.com/nodeschool/berlin/issues/3). Also @maxogden printed some with the logo (see tweet)

[emkay]

Hey all, I made this https://github.com/emkay/all-the-workshops for quickly making *.tgz files with bundled dependencies in case wifi breaks at events and we had to throw them up on the local network or do the USB stick shuffle. Haven't tested it out at a real event yet, but will do so at our event coming up. Probably better ways to do this.

[max-mapper]

First ever NodeSchool Tokyo

Today I helped run a NodeSchool event at the NodeFest.jp conference in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan.

It is a two track conference, and we had 2 hours in one of the tracks dedicated to the NodeSchool.

To prepare, I forked learnyounode, browserify-adventure and levelmeup, added @martinheidegger and @yuskesh as collaborators and then they translated the challenges to Japanese.

• https://github.com/maxogden/learnyounode-jp
• https://github.com/maxogden/levelmeup-jp
• https://github.com/maxogden/browserify-adventure-jp

I simply forked, renamed e.g. learnyounode to learnyounode-jp, and then published each one to npm. So now you can npm install learnyounode-jp (or the other two as well) and it installs the Japanese version of learnyounode.

At first there was a bug in workshopper that wasn't calculating widths correctly for multibyte wide characters but I fixed it in a PR:

Before:

After:

We had around 5 mentors, and they all spoke Japanese except for me :P As a result I wasn't as helpful, but the other mentors were. I did a 10 minute introduction at the beginning and it was live translated by @martinheidegger. In the introduction I explained NodeSchool, showed how to install learnyounode-jp and then did the first two challenges. This is an idea I stole from NodeSchool London. In the past I only showed the Hello World challenge but they show Baby Steps as well, and it really makes a difference.

It was really difficult to get attendees to pair program or raise their hands, so we had to individually ask all attendees if they had any questions to get them to ask for assistance.

In general we have a lot of work to do to make multi language support in workshoppers better. I've opened another issue here to discuss it more:

https://github.com/nodeschool/organizers/issues/64

[martinheidegger]

NodeSchool Osaka Kick-Off

Yesterday I kicked off the first NodeSchool in Osaka. Because I organised it, it also lay upon me to hold the introduction. This meant that people had to sit through my broken japanese (not as good as I should be). As far as I could tell I faired okay but: who knows...

From the 31 people that signed up 25 showed up which is not all bad considering a quite cold thursday evening and after hours. We had 5 mentors which were busy most of the time and unlike the silence in Tokyo we managed to raise the interaction level somehow. A few even worked together!

Location

We had enough space, power outlets and projectors at the kindly shared meeting room of FirstServer who avidly supports the Osaka'n Node community.

Unfortunately the wifi just flatlined before anything had even started (broken router). We helped ourselves with mobile internet (broadly available in japan) and it went surprisingly well. All of the people were able to use to the only workshop that was entirely translated to japanese (learnyounode-jp) and even some necessary node installations worked just fine (4G for the win).

Extras

I prepared NodeSchool stickers and entrance signs that were recieved welcoming. Since they were on my own dime I asked people for a little support. The request was kindly answered:

Preparation

For the workshop we finished translating the learnyounode-jp workshopper that has been used in Tokyo which was necessary. Some of the members had serious struggles when they tried the english workshoppers thus we think improving the translation really would help a lot. Due to a last minute change in the translation one of the topics was broken when the school started. We had to hot-fix it.

I was about to setup USB sticks as well but my spare time ran out. They would have been massively helpful. Next time I will take proper time to prepare usb sticks (Sorry @hayeah for taking up your time).

We used doorkeeper (japanese version of meetup, quite useful actually) to organise the event and think we will do so again in future.

Success

One member managed to finish 10 steps of learnyounode. He got a hug from me and applause from the others. We are looking forward to a leaderboard. Of the people that attended most finished at least 3 steps on their own, fairly many achived 5. This number looks low but considering that more than 50% of the people hadn't installed node yet it seems okay.

@kamiyam had the great idea to explain the 5 first steps of learnyounode at the end. Very useful and a great ending.

Technical Issues

I am not sure if its an issue only I have but the colors of the code-coloring have been proven unreadable on a Projector. Shouldn't this be brighter?

The current fork system for the translations has been botherful to some people since they forgot to add the -jp at the end. They ended up with the english version and struggle with it until I recognised it.

Questions

During the presentation we were explicitly asked for a 'socket.io' workshopper. I asked for one in the workshopper issue board. Unless someone else takes this on I promised to work on it before the next event in january.

Lessons Learned

• Prepare USB sticks (its not optional!)
• Check that the air conditioning (heating) is set to a level where students dont have it too hot/cold.
• 2 hour events might be too short for japanese to get anywhere will stick with the 3 hour length for now.
• Always test the most common workshopper before class.

[mikeal]

I want one of those stickers so bad :)

[roboflank]

I Want to host a node event at my campus,i love the web and hardware a lot and i wanna teach other guys around here the same thing.The issue is that i have no experience with running node events and i haven't been into one either :( and to be frank i don't know where to start

[martinheidegger]

@denzelwamburu First step would be to open a new issue in this issue tracker in which you tell people where you want to have a meetup and that you need help with (x), (y), (z)

[roboflank]

@martinheidegger let me try that

[iancrowther]

in lieu of an issue link..

@denzelwamburu book a room, setup a http://ti.to for tkt reg and plug the link around campus... leave a printout in the computer labs or something.. keep it small 5-10 and you'll figure out your own style and format :-) good luck!

[roboflank]

There hasn't been such an event around here before and people are familiar to such events either.It's kind of a marginalized place with slow internet connectivity plus other minor challenges here and there but people love tech a lot.I will try starting small.Of course i will let you know. Cheers.