Well, back to the community after a short hiatus. This time it was a completely different experience of attending a meetup for many reasons.

  • I am currently in the US (at the time of this writing) – Dallas, Texas
  • I had never attended a meetup outside of Bangalore, India
  • I had never attended a meetup on a weekday evening
  • First leancoffee styled meetup

If you are like me who has never heard about leancoffee until now, I recommend checking out their official website – http://leancoffee.org/ 

Since I was visiting Dallas for a couple of weeks, I thought of exploring how the meetups/user group meetings happen here. Fortunately, a colleague of mine runs a QA & Software Practices meetup here in Dallas (https://www.meetup.com/DFW-QA-Tools-and-Practices/) and I got interested in seeing how thing works here. Went along with him yesterday (August 15, 2017) to Improving’s office to attend my first ever meetup outside of Bangalore. When I went there, I got to know about the DFW Mobile/.Net (https://www.meetup.com/DFW-Mobile-NET/) meetup group and their Lean Coffee Meetup on August 16, 2017 happening at the same place.

So, decided to be part of the meetup and experience lean coffee. To start with there were Pizzas & Drinks sponsored by Improving and then we also had a few people from recruiting firm Camden Kelly handing out flyers about some of the job openings they have. Soon after that Sean Sparkman – President/Organizer of the meetup kicked off the lean coffee table  by giving post it papers and some markers to the attendees to write the topic of their choice which they wanted to discuss. We had about 15 participants and each of them came up with their own topic of interest under mobile development. Once the topics were posted, each and every one of us had to vote for the top 2 topics of our choice. He then ranked the topics from most voted to the least and started discussing on each of them. The topics varied from getting started with cross platform mobile app development, architecting mobile apps for security, Xamarin Forms 3.0 and .NetStandard to name a few.

Since it was an open discussion on each one of the topic, every participant get to talk about it. The format is more of involving everyone in the discussion than just one speaker presenting which was great and welcoming! I also got a chance to give an overview about .netstandard to the participants. I was super excited about the fact that, this was the first time I had ever spoken in a meetup outside of Bangalore, India 🙂

Overall, it was a completely different experience attending a lean coffee meetup and looking forward to organize one in Bangalore soon! (FingersCrossed)

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