As I mentioned in this post, I and a few former colleagues started an LLVM Meetup in Darmstadt in January 2023. Since then, we have seen strong participation, and I am glad the event has gone well.
The original idea was to launch a meet up group in Darmstadt focused on LLVM or compilers in general. When I joined AMD in October 2022, that idea became more and more something I would actually want to do. I spoke with colleagues from my former university institute who are also working on compiler suites. We decided to start the meet up starting in January 2023. Since we didn’t know how to launch it, I reached out to Stefan from the Berlin meetup group to ask what approach would be best for getting people to attend and engaging in potential more and more events.
Reflecting on it, I think there are a couple of things that I want to highlight which I believe work well. At least for us
- Run a consistent schedule and stick to it. We elected to have a minute every odd month — that is January, March, Mai, etc. This gives us a bit of planning headroom, time to find speakers, or prepare content ourselves.
- Have a mix between industry and academic speakers and topics. I think this is important to try and reach a mixed audience and get good discussions going.
- Prepare for recording of talks and publicizing them via YouTube (like we did) or some other platform.
- Be open to ideas from the people attending and value their feedback. As a response to some feedback, we now add some Meetups with two or more different speakers to help variety. I think that was and still is a great change we did.
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