My story behind @LvivDotNet
We had twenty bags of pizza, seventy-five visited meetups and conferences on various topics, five sheets of high-quality stickers, a mind full of ideas, and a whole galaxy of diverse software engineers… and also a few hundrends liters of bad coffee, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, the biggest pint ever of raw desire to create something outstanding.
Not that we needed all that for the organizing a community, but once you get locked into that, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
I am leading @LvivDotNet community for more than a year already. Lviv .NET is a technical community, based in Lviv, Ukraine. We create events for software engineers, mostly about .NET related topics. So, this article is my reflection on that and lessons learned on creating and leading this technical community while being a full-time software engineer at the same time.
Get the thing rollin’. Again.
Not many people know, but the community did exist even when I was like 10 years old. Back in the days, it was lead by another person (Dimka Maleev), but, as usual, the community eventually takes a break when community organizer leaves the city or simply has other things to do. As long as there is somebody to run it, the community will be alive. And each time the leader stopped being interested in running it, the community went on hibernation for a few years.
I did the revival of the community in late 2017. And it went viral. The first meetup we created was more like a validation of the idea — the main goal was to check whether it will be a thing or not. So, I hit up one of the local companies to host us, asked my friends to become speakers, did some SMM to let people know about us, created a speech to introduce ourselves at the event, did some powerpoint magic to make it look fancy and funny. And, I think, that was it. We had ~100 happy attendees which I personally didn’t expect. From that point in time, I started feeling the fact that Lviv .NET community is a thing to me. I knew it’s worth to take it seriously when after this event like twenty people I never knew came to me and said thanks. It feels great — to create something other people can appreciate.
Personally, for me, the initial motivation behind this was to find IRL cool technical content, networking and fun. As I felt the lack of it, I decided to create it myself — DIY.
Also, soft skills. Improving myself in terms of leadership skills, managing the complexity of a fragile human interaction. It’s really fantastic how people communicate their thoughts in totally different ways, how they argue, how they behave in a discussion.
I first started attending technical meetups and conferences when I was 16 years old. That gave me some kind of understanding of how things should look like normally. However, I was only touching it from the distance but never went into inside details, even though the topic seemed interesting to me — how to create a decent community which will attract new members. The community which will bring the value to its members.
Current state
We’ve managed to survive the first year: 12 meetups, 2 conferences, more than 1000 attendees, 15+ local and worldwide companies supported our community in different ways, 20+ speakers from Ukraine and abroad, 250+ members in our telegram chat, many and many likes on our Facebook page.
At some point in time, the community became mature enough to create something for themselves by themselves. The most common example of that is people connecting with each other at the afterparty and telling stories about their projects and eventually, somebody has to say:
Wow, that’s fantastic topic! I would love to know more, maybe you will go on and do a talk at the next meetup?
This is very cool to me.
However, my current vision on technical communities is slightly different from what it was at the very beginning: I would rather go for networking value than for dry tech-talks.
And, of course, we ain’t stoppin’.
Who should lead that thing?
So, at some point in time, I started becoming more interested in something different than running a community and this question raised in my head.
How does the perfect candidate for leading the technical community look like?
That’s important because the leader is the person who does the community in the first place — represents it, drives it, decides on the format. In the end, it’s the person who makes decisions.
Select future leaders based on passion, vision, and empathy, not raw technical ability.
In that field, I find soft skills extremely valuable. For sure, you can be the best technical dude, know all the frameworks, algorithms, but that’s not what is expected from the community leader. My expectations for a community leader are very basic: the person should be passionate, full of energy and communicative. Being able to create a product valuable for other people is the thing.
That’s the role you take as a leader — not to do all the things yourself, but to inspire and show an example.
And, of course, personalities matter. Community leader is the first person to represent a community and create an impression.
Also, age might matter as well. A young person is most likely to have more energy and time to invest. I’m in my very early 20s and I don’t have a big settled family, two dogs, vacations in Spain and stuff. However, the down-side is that when I will move out of the city, I will have to find somebody else to run it.
And, as said above, the community eventually dies if the leader takes a break and don’t teach somebody else how to cook this community stuff.
So, there is a sense of having a team with distributed knowledge of how to create a good community. For me, it’s always a good idea to let somebody new create an event, pick topics, speakers, location, organize all the stuff. The people who attend all the meetups might be good candidates to offer them to do so :)
Set high goals
The plan should be perfect, the delivery should be flawless.
Think constantly about how you can do this thing better. Do follow-ups. Collect feedbacks. Learn from people who are doing other technical communities as well.
It’s not that easy — you need to believe in everything you create, but at the same time, be open to criticism — criticism’s worth some more than compliments.
Of course, you will fail from time to time. Pizza delivery will forget about your order, speakers will get lost right before the event and you will have to do a talk you did a year ago at some conference, location owner will turn you down in the last moment.
These things just happen.
By the way, our next meetup will be about the mistakes we make as software engineers. Lviv .NET #12: Learn to fail, fail to learn. I believe almost every software engineer screwed something in the production database back in the days. This meetup is intended to teach us how to learn from our mistakes and how to prevent them by building corresponding development processes.
In the end, it’s hard work
This is the best kind of satisfaction you can get — when you are doing something people appreciate. Even though it’s something small like creating a local community for people with similar interests.
It’s ain’t much, but it’s honest work. And, for sure, hard work pays off.
