How to make a fun effective programming meetup that benefits both beginners and advanced coders.

Question

If you could organise your own programming meetup how would you organise the session so that people

1. had fun
2. learnt lots
3. were able to participate despite their level.

what kinds of topics, activities, challenges etc would you include (not all in one session but in general)

how would you handle differing levels? what do you think are some important things to learn, to achieve?

Any input is greatly appreciated. Im not sure how Id mark the best answer, perhaps leave it to the community to vote for it.

Answer 1

Perhaps, present a number of challenges with different levels of difficulty. The participants should then form small groups and try to solve their chosen problem together.

• They should probably try to find teammates with similar proficiency levels.

• They should choose a problem that is challenging and interesting for all of them.

• The use of small groups may encourage discussion and learning.

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http://uva.onlinejudge.org/ has lots of small programming challenges that can be used as they are, or for inspiration.

Answer 2

A couple of ideas come to mind that you may want to research further:

• Code Camps are one idea where you could have different tracks depending on what people are interested in hearing and wanting to know more about certain topics. In this case, the advanced users are presenting to the more basic users in some cases but this can be helpful for a variety of reasons, IMO.

• Outside-of-the-Box Conference is another idea where the group that shows up determines what gets discussed and is a very interesting self-organizing conference. This can be tricky because it requires facilitators that can draw out of people what they want and then see that come to fruition. Someone wants to talk about continuous-integration? Well, it depends on if others want that idea to be done too. This carries an odd cost in terms of understanding that whoever comes may have to be educated about what their role is in such an activity as those who just watch may well be quite disappointed while those that roll up their sleeves and jump into the activity may have quite a different experience.

Another key point is are you trying to pass along technical knowledge, form network contacts about various topics, attempt to reach consensus on issues like convention vs. configuration, or something else? Sometimes it can be good just to bring a community together and see what happens.