February 5, 2019

🚧 Building the first Indian Vue.js Community

This is a reflection on our journey so far in organizing Vue.js meetups. The road was not easy to travel, but we’re glad we did!

Vue is a progressive framework for building user interfaces. Unlike other monolithic frameworks, Vue is designed from the ground up to be incrementally adoptable.

• 📌 The VueBLR chapter was started in Bangalore around 2 years back.
• 🔟 We have organized 10 meetups so far. The first one was on March 25, 2017, while the most recent one was on Jan 26, 2019.
• ⛲️ We have had talks, demos, code-along exercises, show & tell sessions, and full-day workshops. We have covered a variety of topics including SSR, State Management, Internals of Vue, Testing Vue Components, Building Mobile Apps, etc.
• 🤩 We have also had a Q&A session by Evan You, the creator of Vue.js!
• 🏋️‍♀️ Getting the initial traction was quite difficult. We started maintaining Twitter and Facebook profiles for VueBLR to promote the meetups.
• 📹 We tried live streaming a couple of our early meetups. But we didn’t see a good return on investment out of this, so ultimately we decided to stop it.
• 🍕 In the early days, I remember we tried using pizza to increase turnout!
• 😎 Developers love swag! We printed out some sweet stickers to give away.
• 👕 We gave out 2 t-shirts to speakers in one of the meetups, but it didn’t really scale well.
• 🤦‍♂ We had one of the sessions taken by Pooya Parsa from Iran, but we failed terribly to get the word out!
• 🤷‍♂️ We talked about having webinars, but didn’t give it a try.
• 🗣️ Finding speakers is the major challenge we have in terms of sustainability. We have still not figured it out yet.
• 😞 There was a time where only 2 attendees turned up at one of our meetups! We were quite disappointed and gave a hard thought afterward to decide whether to continue or not. Finally, we decided to give it another try!
• 🏃 We have had last-minute cancellations of speakers, but we continued anyway.
• 🤘 The Cashback Idea (buy tickets for a meetup; get refunded if you show up) was kind of a mini-eureka moment for us!
  Attendance rate has been close to 100% ever since it was introduced.
  Now we have good predictability in order to ensure space and food arrangements!
• 🏡 We used to have an extra overhead of finding a place for our next meetup and visiting it beforehand to check for things like is there enough space, how’s the wifi speed, is the projector working, etc.
  We have had meetups in a variety of places, including Your Story, 91SpringBoard, HasGeek, Anatta Design, Meesho, etc.
  Finally, the tech initiative of Myntra joined us as our community partner. Things have been a lot smoother since! Those ‘ol days have long gone. Thank you, Myntra! ❤️

What’s next (or nuxt 😉)?

• 🤞 We want to have regular (monthly) meetups in 2019.
• 🦄 We are planning to have an unconference in Bangalore on May 4th, where nobody will be a passive attendee. The details are still being chalked out. If you’re interested, please register here.
• 🤫 There are also plans to host the first Indian edition of Vue Conference sometime in August. Join over 600 members on our Meetup group and stay tuned for more updates!

We’d love for you to join us and spread the word about Vue.js ❤️
Please contact @znck0 or me to start a meetup in your city and help the community grow. 🙌

Until We Meet Again…
🖖 swap