introduction

hey, i’m alan and i’m the creator of this site. i’m originally from brooklyn, ny and i’ve been a utica resident for four years and i currently work remotely as a backend developer working primarily with ruby / rails (so probably not a surprise to you that i built this static website using jekyll).

lately i’ve started to miss the tech scene back in the city where it was a lot easier to find meetups with other folks in the tech space. since there aren’t any dev-specific groups that i could find in the area at the moment, this is my attempt at changing that.

choosing a focus for this type of group was tricky and probably something that will need to evolve as i learn more about what works/doesn’t work for a smaller tech community like utica. like, should this be a more “lets sit and shoot the shit about tech” type thing? is it a co-working thing where you bring your own laptop and project? or is it super specific to a particular technology or stack like a ruby or rails meetup? i mean i’d love to have ALL of it but i’m only one person with limited time. going too broad and trying to be something for everyone may be more inclusive at the outset but from my experience is not great for engagement, but niching down for a city that already does not have much of a tech scene seems equally risky. this isn’t exactly a permanent decision, but i want it to be an intentional one.

after discussing this with my friend peter and also separately with my wife, i decided to take the startup approach of focusing on making fewer users very happy instead of lots of users “meh” happy. i chose coding challenges as a focus because:

• i enjoy solving them for fun and personal development, and if it’s not fun for me then i won’t be motivated to try to make this group work. also there’s an endless source of coding exercises / puzzles so picking a source of discussion is pretty easy
• it’ll hopefully attract other devs who are similiarly internally drivien / motivated and see value in doing these problems so there’s less of a need to promote or advertise benefits of the group
• it does not really exclude more broad themes in the future - if there are folks who are more interested in talking about specific languages or just tech in general, we can probably find a way to add that

next steps

i still need to figure out how to actually get the word out (ugh, marketing…). for this site, there’s probably some basic seo things i should do to maximize the chance of this site showing up when local dev folks search for meetups, but that’s not likely to happen for another 6 months to a year. so as a start, i’m going to try to post regularly here so at least the site is up to date and won’t be completely neglected by crawlers.

there’s also more immediate and less tech oriented things i can try, like putting up flyers at coffee shops or the local co-working space.